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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Artist Statement

My practice inhabits the interstice between grief and joy — a liminal space where memory, gesture, and childlike spontaneity converge. Through a visual language rooted in abstraction, I explore the weight of loss and the lightness of play, inviting the viewer into an emotive terrain that transcends narrative.

Each painting is both residue and relic — a trace of performance enacted through instinctive mark-making, physical movement, and intuitive response. The canvas, often unstretched and placed on the ground, becomes a site of encounter: with memory, with the body, with the ineffable.

Grief is not simply a theme — it is a collaborator in my work. Following the death of my father from a congenital heart condition shared by both of us — a week before my eighth birthday — my artistic inquiry has been shaped by a profound sense of absence and its quiet echoes in the everyday. Through layered brushwork and fragments of text, I construct portals for connection and repair.

Titles such as Swimming Pool, It Took Only a Moment to Love You, and Candy Floss Happiness function as emotional access points — familiar, quotidian references that invite viewers to inscribe their own memories onto the work. The personal becomes collective; the abstract, intimate.

Initially, my engagement with grief was unconscious. During my early studies, I investigated loss on a historical and cultural scale — the Irish Famine, global conflict, inherited trauma. It was only during my degree and Masters that grief revealed itself as the central thread — not as subject matter, but as method, as material.

In Daddy’s Bread, my degree show installation and performance, I assembled 796 bread bags — one for each week since my father’s passing. Sorting through them rhythmically, I enacted a quiet, durational search. The mound of plastic became both monument and metaphor: a tactile archive of childhood grief, whispering the unspeakable.

This is the space I hold for my audience — beneath colour, beyond gesture — an invitation to dwell in silence, to locate their own grief and grace within abstraction. My work seeks not to resolve loss, but to coexist with it. To hold both ache and lightness simultaneously.

Influenced by landscape, the rural site of my upbringing, and the innocence of my own children’s experience, my practice is also concerned with tenderness, nostalgia, and belonging. Through painting, performance, and process, I attempt to visualise the poetics of living — where sorrow and sweetness reside side by side.