D a i s y H a r c o u r t
I work under my great-grandmother’s name. Her mother was an artist, so it felt fitting to carry on that creative thread.
About
Daisy Harcourt lives and works on the south coast of England. She studied Fine Art and has worked as an artist educator. Her practice is primarily focused on portraiture, exploring how identity is shaped by nature, language, place and lived experience.
Through drawing and painting, she combines close observation with research, exploring how images and text can work together to reveal something of an individual's life, history and personal story. Her practice is driven by a strong interest in connecting with people, and in the ways creativity and storytelling can reveal something of who we are.
Projects
The main focus of each portrait series I create is exploring the connections people have with the world around them. I develop these portraits by engaging with participants and listening to their reflections on formative experiences related to each theme.
I particularly enjoy this process— the search for common threads and resonances between the sitters often
shapes the portraits themselves.
The themes so far - Women & Water, People & Plants and Women & Word.
Daisy Harcourt 2026
Portraits on copper
Historical Women Artist Portraits
This series of small oil paintings on copper depicts women painters spanning five centuries.
Exhibitions
Town House Spitalfields, 21st March - 21st April 2024
In this series I invited 14 contemporary women to write about their formative experiences of the written and spoken word. Each participant revealed their favourite words and discussed the writers and books that had influenced them. It was while considering what each sitter had written that I created each portrait.
Women & Word Review
Matilda Warner for Univ in the Arts
This exhibition is a room of our own and we are delighted to welcome you,” writes Laura. In Daisy’s portraits, almost every woman looks directly at us – something remarkable in its rarity in our most prestigious art galleries – as if to defy and befriend the viewer simultaneously. Only one, Jo, looks away, considering a smooth stone in her hands, and the way in which this links to her very visceral description of the material, physical effect of words, as if powerful enough to leap into and alter landscapes, is rather special. Jo is an artist, her medium is stone.
T i r z a h
Modern Women Artists
In 2022 I created illustrated portraits of artist Eileen Mayo (book 8) potter Lucie Rie (book 9) and artist Tirzah Garwood (book 10) for Eiderdown Books . Eiderdown Books is an independent publisher making books about Modern Women Artists written by leading female writers, art historians and cultural commentators.
Women & Word
Female writers and literary characters feature in this portrait series. Link to an interview with me during the exhibition of this work at Weald Contemporary in October 2023 below.
Artist Spotlight
Interview with Manderley Press
Is the house in Sea II inspired by an actual building or place?
I have very happy childhood memories of family holidays on the Devon and Cornwall coast; although not an actual building or place, the scene perhaps represents those places.