Article By: Zak Lodhi
There is a quiet precision beneath the color. Every work of Kimberly Harris comes to life beneath your gaze, bright shapes and brilliant silhouettes seem to dance across the canvas. At first glance, her work feels joyful, even mischievous, with bold shapes, unexpected patterns, and exciting colors that bounce off one another. Taking a look at her ceramic forms, and you feel this as well. They tilt and stretch into unlikely silhouettes. Watercolors stack geometric forms into rhythmic, floating worlds that take shape. But we invite you to take a longer look, wait for a while, and something else emerges: an underlying sense of order. A logic. A compositional discipline that holds the exuberance in place.
Before becoming a full-time artist, Kimberly spent more than four decades as an architect, designing hospitality projects across the country. Structure, proportion, and spatial thinking were once her daily language. Today, those instincts remain, translated into clay, watercolor, steel, wood, and printmaking, mediums that allow play to live comfortably alongside precision.
Watercolor has become her primary voice in two dimensions. In the studio and on location, she builds whimsical compositions from pattern, line, and color, allowing forms to interlock and drift like pieces of an invented map. It’s rare for an artist’s palette to be a work of art as well. Saturated. Unafraid of contrast. Every work has an incredible sense of color! Shapes repeat, bend, overlap, and echo, creating a sense of motion that feels both spontaneous and carefully constructed.
But that is far from her other work! Her ceramic works carry the same spirit, lively, graphic, slightly surreal, objects that feel both functional and fantastical. Vessels become full characters as they burst with a unique and wonderful life.
All of her works have been colored by the time she’s spent traveling. Artist residencies have carried Kimberly from Zion National Park to Greece, Rome, France, Iceland, and beyond. Each location leaves a subtle imprint, not as a literal landscape, of course, but as rhythm and texture. Time spent at the Skopelos Foundation introduced her to printmaking. CRETA in Rome deepened her ceramic practice. Vallauris connected her to the lineage of artists who shaped clay before her. In Iceland, painting took center stage, light and color shifting her palette once again.
Kimberly credits each of these experiences with helping her evolve her practice and her work: each one but a single brushstroke, in the life of Kimberly Harris. Closer to home, she has worked alongside students to create large-scale ceramic mosaic murals and contributed to public art projects across Arizona, from sculptural installations to expansive metal-and-mosaic works woven into everyday spaces.
studiok@myctl.net | @kimberlyharris6305
