Harry McAlpine’s Push’n up Daisies, his second solo show with CHALK HORSE, is his most ambitious body of work to date. It features his largest drawing yet alongside his first drawing presented within an intricate, hand-crafted cabinet frame.
Most of the drawings in Push’n up Daisies re-stage beach scenes from McAlpine’s uncle’s black-and-white photographs taken roughly fifty years ago. McAlpine invited friends to reenact these moments. As he writes in an email:
They get me every time. I was thinking to myself today that one might argue that these works have in fact been in the making for 50 odd years, and that the meaning contained in that original moment has travelled, as if through a wormhole, across time and space. I think that is the rationale behind wanting to recreate them?
Push’n up Daisies presents various reflections on the ways time expresses itself through human beings, examining how we perceive, remember, and exist through the body. The choice to draw rather than to merely re-photograph foregrounds memory and handcraft. Each mark is micro-aware, pixel-like in precision, yet also conscious of the image as an integrated whole. The drawing acts as embodied perception. The act as rooted in the body in the way it connects the hand, eye, and self to the world. This aligns with French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau‑Ponty who thought of time as not something external or measured by clocks; it is something we live through, called “lived time.” Time is not a container in which events unfold, but something constituted through our experience. He referred to time as a “field of presence”, where past, present, and future are interwoven.
While reproduction exists as a process in Push’n up Daisies and speaks to nostalgia and the timeless need to connect with the natural world and other human beings, it always speaks to how each image carries a different meaning and intention through the bodies that re-enact them. The process of making these works illustrates memory as not a mental replay of the past but a re-enactment of past experience through the body and perception. The past is not recalled through detached observation, but re-lived in a bodily way.
McAlpine’s visit to Taipei’s Palace Museum left a lasting impact. He speaks of objects “positively charged” when crafted slowly, as opposed to the rapid churn of capitalist production:
When we spend time transforming material into art, or craft, or whatever, we charge it with meaning… One imagines a quiet craftsman 2000 years ago with humble tools, working slowly on this piece of furniture, and 2000 years later it’s meaning has endured.
These words are echoed in Quasi-Clock, the sculptural wooden cabinet which the artist constructed himself. With a strong reverent presence it appears almost like a body before us, inviting us closer in the way we observe and physically interact with it and the image it holds inside.
A theme consistent in McAlpine’s practice is the raw force of nature. His figures don’t simply approach it, they desire to merge with it. In Re-enactment #2, two men handstand and look as if trying to pierce the shoreline; in Re-enactment #3 their bodies lay flat imprinting themselves against the sand and water; and Re-enactment #1 shows the sand figures gripping sand, crawling towards the horizon into the lapping tide.
These interactions evoke a profound submission to elemental forces. In Push’n up Daisies 1, 2 and 3, this theme becomes further embedded. McAlpine’s largest drawings and his first on linen, show a figure laying beneath the earth, their arms and hands reaching above to clutch the soil and daisies. The figure does not look uncomfortable rather the opposite and strikingly, the flowers themselves are not fully rendered. Instead, they shimmer with a ghostly, almost spiritual presence. The works express a moment where the human and natural environment merge materially and metaphorically. While these works don’t reference, McAlpine’s uncles photos, they are compositions McAlpine created himself, they reference something his uncle once said:
Last week I made the pilgrimage to Alfred & Effies unmarked grave at Karori Cemetery to ponder their lives & watch them push up daisies in the warm sunshine.
Push’n up Daisies is a reminder of our bodies, how they hold so much more than organs and bones. Composed with mediums drawn from the earth, charcoal and wood, Push’n up Daisies grounds our humanity in the rhythms of nature and reminds us that art can serve as a bridge between earth, body, and memory.
Elle Charalambu, 2025
