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.

——————————————————————————————————————————————

Artist Statement

My father died from a heart defect the week before my 8th birthday. I retreated into the dreamy world of my own head, a place of fantasy, romance and marshmallow softness, an escape from the loneliness and sadness of his absence. I lived wedged between grief and joy; as an artist I was forged in that liminal space.

I am constantly unravelling the place that grief has in our lives. Exploring the landscape between deep sadness and sporadic laughter. Greeting grief like a person invited to my practice, I ask the viewer to connect to their own experiences of loss through my paintings. Calling on both memory and childlike play, my work is bold and expressive, instinctive marks and strong brushstrokes that invite the viewer to partake in the freedom and lightness that abstraction allows. 

Loss can and does coexist with joy in everyday moments– the ephemeral beauty of the garden outside my door, feeling the closeness of my father on the small holding where I grew up, the fleeting wild days of childhood of my three boys. I seek to portray the lightness that life can have amidst the dark and heavy.

My practice explores the intersection of performance, memory, and materiality. Each painting emerges as a trace of a physical act—gestural, instinctive mark-making using oil paint and industrial brushes on unstretched canvas. These works are remnants of movement, where the written word and brushwork function in tandem

Titles such as Swimming Pool, It Took Only a Moment to Love You, and Candy Floss Happiness offer familiar entry points. They serve as emotional cues—personal, yet universally resonant—drawing the viewer into the performance behind the surface.

A pivotal work in my practice, Daddy’s Bread, was a performance and installation using 796 bread bags—one for every week since 1991—collected from my late father’s favourite loaf. This piece became a quiet archive of grief, transforming a humble domestic material into a monument of loss, memory, and time.

Since my MFA, I have continued to explore the distortion of the familiar—be it through fragmented body forms or skewed everyday objects. This interest now extends into painting, where rural Irish landscapes are reframed through surreal palettes—purple skies, exaggerated forms—challenging the viewer’s expectations and emotional readings.

At the core of my work is a desire to interrupt the familiar and provoke new ways of seeing. I invite viewers into spaces where memory, personal history, and the absurd converge—spaces that ask not to be solved, but to be felt.

———————————————————————————————-