Katharine Harvey is a Canadian visual artist specializing in painting and sculpture. Her art projects range from site-specific paintings to colourful large-scale architectural windows to kinetic sculptures playing with fantasy and light. She has designed both temporary and permanent installations - made out of transparent recycled plastic materials, glass, LED lights, and steel - in Canada, U.S., and Germany.

In June 2016, Concord Adex officially launched Harvey’s public artwork, Gardiner Streams, at Quartz Condominium Towers in Toronto. The colourful 35 x 74 foot window seen from the Gardiner Expressway is located at Concord CityPlace beside Douglas Coupland’s iconic red canoe. The artist will have a solo exhibition of her work at Nicholas Metivier Gallery in 2017.

A mini survey of Katharine Harvey’s work was showcased at The Latcham Gallery in Stouffville in the fall of 2015. For more information, please see the essay by Chai Duncan, curator of the Latcham Gallery, called Waves of Light.

Photographs of the artist’s large scale installations were included in a group show at Galerie Borchardt in Hamburg, Germany, entitled In Situ, in 2015. The gallery published a photo essay about the show. The exhibition was part of Hamburg’s city-wide architecture summer festival.

Harvey has created twenty site-specific recycled plastic installations since 2001. She collects waste materials and disposable objects and ties them together with monofilament into long strands. Over the years, the installation projects have incorporated the materials of the previous ones, and increased in size as the commissions become more ambitious. She has created five temporary installations for Brookfield Properties in Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium in California hired the artist to create a permanent sculpture for their Fragile Seas exhibit in 2012. The ten-foot-tall, ten-foot-wide, two-foot-deep display case, entitled To the Depths, consists of recycled plastic tied together with fishing line. The piece aims to educate the public about how plastic pollution destroys marine life in our oceans and the importance of recycling or reusing household containers.

Katharine Harvey’s exhibition history includes shows at Skulpturenprojekt (Stade, Germany), First Canadian Place (Toronto), Bank of America (Los Angeles), World Financial Center (New York), Nicholas Metivier Gallery (Toronto), Scotiabank Nuit Blanche Festival and Ontario House at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.

The artist is the recipient of a People’s Choice Award at the 2008 Nuit Blanche festival in Toronto for her large-scale outdoor installation entitled Waterfall. Harvey’s artwork is featured in CBC Television’s Arts Channel Bold documentary, entitled Super 8: The Art of Making It.

Her paintings can be found in the corporate collections of the Bank of Montreal, Famous Players Media, Ontario Hospital Association, Encana Corp, Osler Hoskin & Harcourt, Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, TD Canada Trust, and Telus Canada.

Having received a BFA from Queen’s University and an MFA from the University of Victoria, she lives and works in Markham, Ontario. Her work is represented by Nicholas Metivier Gallery in Toronto, Canada, and Galerie Borchardt in Hamburg, Germany.