Wild Hearts
Lineage
Wild Hearts
A note on the series
There’s a moment in the making of each work where something shifts.
You’re deep in the drawing, hours in, sometimes days and the forms that have been separate begin to read as one. The wolves stop being two animals and become a single shape. The elephants stop being a family and become something closer to a symbol. Not imposed. Not designed. Arrived at through the patient accumulation of marks and the geometry of how living things hold each other when they feel safe.
That moment is what Wild Hearts is about.
The series began, as most things do, with a feeling rather than a plan. I’d been thinking about protection, what it looks like, what it costs, how it shows up in the natural world without sentimentality or performance. Animals don’t protect their young because it’s beautiful. They do it because it’s necessary. And yet the shapes that protection makes the curve of a body around something smaller, the proximity of two animals whose combined form becomes a shelter. Those shapes are among the most quietly moving things I’ve ever tried to draw.
The heart wasn’t the starting point. It was the discovery.
When Georgia and I began composing the first work, wolves, a family group, the adults curled toward each other with the pups between them, the heart emerged from the composition before we’d consciously placed it there. We’d been working from reference, thinking about weight and balance and the way fur sits differently on a resting body than a standing one, and then we stepped back and the shape was simply there. Formed by proximity. By care. We kept going.
Four works are complete. Wolves. Elephants. Snow leopards. Springboks. Each one 160 by 113 centimetres, drawn in charcoal on museum-grade paper with the same two pencils we’ve used since the beginning. Each one taking months. Each one arriving at its heart in its own way. The elephants through the massive curved bodies of the adults and the smallness of the calf between them; the snow leopards through the interlocking of spotted limbs and the long tail that resolves the composition at the bottom; the springboks through the unexpected drama of the horns rising out of what is otherwise a study in stillness.
They are the same and they are entirely different. That’s the point of a series.
The series is planned as fourteen works. We’re continuing to draw. Lions are next.
Each original is unique. Drawn once, unrepeatable, a record of a specific period of making. Originals and limited editions will be available when the work is ready.. People in our Collectors Circle will hear first.
If the work has found you, I’m glad. That’s all any of it is for.
Rob Harris
April 2025
