Savannah Marie Harris

Artist Profile

Savannah Marie Harris (b. 1999, London). Lives and works in London.

Savannah Marie Harris makes abstract paintings in oil, oil stick and sand on canvas. Her subject is the slow work of geology: sedimentation, erosion, rock formation and the folds and faults in the earth’s surface. The sand, sourced from the Caribbean, ties the paintings to her Caribbean and Cuban heritage.

Each canvas is built over months. Harris applies eight to ten layers of paint mixed with sand, then breaks the surface down by scraping, sanding and scratching with a palette knife or sponge, before building it up again. Bright early colours are gradually muted by the accumulated layers, leaving a dense, crusted surface crossed by gestural strokes and stains. Paintings move around the studio, between wall and floor, as they develop. Her large canvases often measure around two metres: Ossified and Dissolution, shown in Undo (2026), are each 230 cm high. Alongside these she makes small paintings in acrylic on paper, some under 14 cm high, which study light falling across hillsides, woodland and coves.

Harris graduated in Fine Art: Painting from Wimbledon College of Arts in 2020 and completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2023, supported by the Ali H. Alkazzi Scholarship. She is represented by Harlesden High Street, London, where she held solo exhibitions in 2023 and 2024, and with which she presented solo booths at Minor Attractions (2023), Frieze London (2024) and Independent, New York (2025). Further solo exhibitions followed at Vardaxoglou, London (2025) and Gathering, Ibiza (2026). Group exhibitions include Voyage at Maureen Paley: Morena di Luna, Hove (2024). In 2024 she received the inaugural Artsy Foundations Prize.