Biography
Makiko Harris is a London-based interdisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, installation, film, and live performance. Born to a mixed Japanese and American family and raised between continents, her practice traces the contemporary feminist, biracial, and diasporic experience through fragments of the body.
Harris distorts photographs of herself until they hover between recognition and abstraction, then translates these into laser-cut steel, powder-coated panels, and oversized fabricated objects such as needles, nails, and lockets which are suspended on chains or placed as sculptural presences. Painting enters as a counterpoint: translucent, corporeal, and slow, creating a dialogue with the hard surfaces of fabricated metal. Together, these materials stage an encounter between the technological and the bodily, the protective shell and the tender interior.
Alongside each body of sculptural and painted work, Harris develops a parallel performance proposition, a repeatable structure of live event, costume, and sound that is integral to each exhibition concept. Each performance has its own costume design, sonic landscape, and live event logic, often developed in collaboration with longtime music and costume design collaborators. Theatre, sound, and the live presence of the artist's body are not supplements to the exhibition but an integral part of how each body of work is conceived and intended to be experienced.
Recent exhibitions include: New Contemporaries at South London Gallery (2026); Body Archive (Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin, 2025); Needle Dance (Art'otel Hoxton x KH Gallery, London, 2025); Lacquered Rebellion (Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, 2024); Mega Nail in Lady Alleyn Red (Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 2025); Wilhelm Hallen 06, Berlin Art Week (2025); and forthcoming solo exhibition I Hold You in Devotion (Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, West Palm Beach, Florida, 2026) and group exhibition at MIMA Middlesbrough (2026). Harris is an Ingram Prize Finalist (2024), Cass Art Prize Finalist (2025), and New Contemporaries selected artist (2026).
Harris holds an MA in Contemporary Art Practice: Critical Practice from the Royal College of Art (2023). She is represented by Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London and Berlin.