Arte Realizzata
In Conversation with Hilary Harnischfeger
Written by Lea Nguyen
LEA NGUYEN: How has the environment and landscape around you informed your subject matter and/or ideas around your work? Has your upbringing in different places influenced you?
HILARY HARNISCHFEGER: Growing up between very different places taught me to experience landscape as something emotional and embodied. The environments I’ve lived in have shaped my work by teaching me to think of landscape as a record of time, memory, and contradictions rather than just a setting.
For example, in West and Central Texas, the land feels exposed and ancient—evidence of geologic time is visible in the rock, erosion, and vast scale. That sense of deep time made me attentive to layers and permanence, and to how small and temporary human marks can feel in comparison. Houston complicated that view. Its dense vegetation, humidity, flooding, and infrastructure compress time, making change feel constant and cyclical. There, landscape is something negotiated and unstable, shaped as much by systems and climate as by nature.
New York City shifted my focus from horizons to fragments. Space is vertical and interrupted, and the environment is experienced in pieces—through reflections, shadows, and movement—which influenced how I think about compression, rhythm, and layering. Underlying all of this are my earliest memories in Japan, where balance, framing, and the quiet coexistence of nature and structure first shaped my sensitivity to place. Together, these environments inform and ground my work in contrast, temporality, and lived experience of landscape.
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