Laura J Harris is a UK-based synaesthetic visual artist working in acrylic and mixed media.

Laura experiences music through colour, texture, and shape – not as metaphor, but as a literal, involuntary
part of listening. For most of her life, she assumed this was simply what music was: something heard and
seen simultaneously.

Harris did not realise synaesthesia had a name until an A-level music lesson, when she found herself
describing a section of Beethoven’s Op. 61 (Violin Concerto) to her teacher as having teal-green domes,
with the violin running through like fine gold thread: bright, filamented, almost physical. That conversation
marked a quiet shift. Her experience itself did not change, but it became recognisable as a distinct way of
sensing, rather than a private oddness, gone unquestioned.

Her practice emerges from this intersection between sound and the visual field.
Music arrives with its own temperature and architecture: piano often moves from deep blue, almost black
through lighter blue into white then pink, while certain minor-key progressions pull towards reds and burnt
oranges. Different chord changes behave differently; they can press, lift, fracture, blur, or glint.
Each piece of music forms its own world yet recurring visual “voices” also appear as recognisable
signatures that seem to follow composers and performers across different works.
In the studio, Harris uses layering, allowing rhythm to shape pace and pressure. Expressing how internal
experience becomes tangible and how something ephemeral can be given surface, weight, and
presence.

I SEE MUSIC is her debut collection.

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