BIO

Aly Harte was awarded a First Class honours in her Bachelor in Fine art from University of Ulster and a pass with distinction in her MFA Painting and performance from Belfast Art College.

Harte lives by the coast in Northern Ireland with her family (husband Michael and their three boys) and works from her Belfast city centre studio. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including her solo exhibition in her Holywood shop front 2022 called ‘Feels like Home’, a transitional stage in her career having grown the business by 300% post covid whilst teaching people online how to paint loose.

In recent months Harte’s work has shipped to private collectors in New York and Australia. She created site specific work for The Conrad Hotel in Quinta do Lago Portugal alongside award winning London interior designers Fern and Anderson.

She has painted live for Cricket Ireland at their Stormont grounds and has been selected for a two week residency in Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost ranch, Santa Fe New Mexico February 2026.

Upon viral success in March, Harte’s YouTube channel has gained over ten thousand subscribers and over 1 million views. She continues to teach people how to paint loose, on and offline, with her vibrant and sought after techniques.

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Artists statement

My paintings are wedged in a gap of grief- between sadness and joy. Calling on memory and childlike play they are bold and expressive allowing the viewer to partake in the freedom and lightness that abstraction allows. The painting is often a relic of my performance. Instinctive mark making and sporadic movement is the entirety of the performance.

Deriving from the underbelly of grief having journeyed loss when my Father died (of the same heart defect as myself) the week before my 8th birthday, I use written word and brushstrokes to promote healing and connection.

Oil on unstretched canvas is the preferred medium as well as painting on the ground. I bring the viewer into this performative act by giving each painting a title familiar to their everyday experiences. Thus inviting my audience to bring their personal story to the piece , ‘Swimming pool’ ‘It took only a moment to love you’, ‘ candy floss happiness’.

I am constantly unravelling the place that grief has in our lives. Romanticising a language between deep sadness and sporadic laughter . Greeting grief like a person invited to my practice, my hope is that the viewer finds acceptance in their own loss through connection with my paintings. Loss co existing with everyday moments .

As a child I lived in my own head from 1992. A place of fantasy, romance and marshmallow softness, a stark contrast to the loneliness and sadness that was my reality after Dad died.

Until my degree show in 2005 I had not acknowledged grief in my life never mind my practice. I was fascinated with grief on a global scale researching the Great famine of 1800s and World war 2 of early 1900s.

The dissection of  tragedy , grief and silence during my Masters and Degree became the loudest moment of clarity where my art spoke my truth and I did not realise. Resolving my degree show with the performance and installation titled ‘Daddy’s bread’ I used 796 bread bags of my late father’s favourite bread ( one bread bag for every week since 1991 until my degree show’) to combine this everyday tangible object, a bread bag, and my performance where I searched quietly and rhythmically through them for my Dad. A mound of plastic bread bags symbolising, whispering my childhood grief.

That is what I want for my viewer, the art to speak to them below the superficial colour and expression. Paintings holding space for their quiet while showcasing loud abstraction.

My Art is not a backward exploration but rather a discovery of self and growth with art at the helm. Alongside the undercurrent of loss I am inspired  by landscape, the small holding where I grew up, my own children’s experience of life without loss and, travel. I seek to portray visually the lightness that life can have amidst the dark and heavy.

The familiar and the familial have been a part of my practice since my Masters 18 years ago where I studied the distortion of familiar objects and body parts. Letting the human brain be challenged with still footage of feet on rocks looking like hands or a birds claws.. Most recently my paintings explore this distortion with purple sea in landscapes, neon marks and the use of a mop to paint oil on extra large canvas. I wish the viewer to be confronted with interest and interrupted in their mainstream thinking.