Harriet Sanderson exhibits nationally, primarily in alternative spaces.

Her work includes:

• experimental and traditional prints
• works on paper
• print based and sculptural installations
• videotaped and photographic performance

In 2007 Sanderson won the prestigious Wynn Newhouse Award. Born in Lebanon, Indiana, she has been a Seattle resident since 1985.

"A conceptual artist in the tradition of Eva Hesse and Ree Morton."

— Lois Allan, book 1997

"Fills a critical gap in the national discussion on disability."

— Ann Fox, essay 2009

"An everyday object of age and infirmity given unexpected aesthetic whimsy."

— Brandon Kiley, The Stranger 2004

"Dazzling works of art."

— Regina Hackett, The Post-Intelligencer 1999

"Deceptively simple but highly poetic."

— Robin Updike, The Seattle Times 1997

"Ambiguities of presence and absence, anticipation and loss…"

— Pam Keeley, Reflex 199?

"Wraps printmaking, performance, body art and photodocumentary convincingly together."

— Lyn Smallwood, The Seattle Weekly 1990

"Explores the dysfunction of the chairs, they work with their canes to stand and walk and finally dance."

— Robert Mittenthal, catalogue 2007

"She is a conceptual artist in the tradition of Eva Hesse and Ree Morton who rejected the cool detachment of minimalism with art that was personal and that elevated affect above formalism. For Sanderson, as for them, art and life come together. Employing non-art materials, non-traditional printmaking methods, and unusual presentations, she confronts life's difficulties, ironies, and absurdities, particularly in their relationship to physical limitations imposed by less-than-perfect bodies.

Although much contemporary body-related art is overtly political, Sanderson's is not. Instead, it is emotive, focusing on an issue not often explored in art: the body in its capacity to shape one's life, both physically and psychologically. Concerns about self-image, intimate relationships, physical functioning, and social biases are all related in varying degrees to one's sex, race, age, appearance, and health."

— Lois Allan
Contemporary Printmaking in the Northwest
G+B Arts International, Sydney, Australia, 1997

"Harriet Sanderson has been producing a body of work that could eventually change the paradigm for art that is ruefully identified with objects of the handicapped. Finding her art to be more poetic than pedantic, I translate it from the objects used to the language represented. It speaks eloquently of the pain and pathos as well as the playfulness of her processes (seen, perhaps, most clearly in her videotapes).

Her employment of the readymade objects as well as narrative drawings, prints and photographs disclose multiple layers of technical abilities all of which are a pleasure to behold. She is asking us to look beyond the materials to understand their conceptual nature which, in a sense, is not unlike asking us to look beyond the handicap to the person. The materials are removed from the usual and challenged to become the art, making them quite beautiful.

We should give Sanderson's work the time it deserves and we soon see not only the message but also the importance of the redefinition... hence the new paradigm."

— Carole Fuller (reprinted by permission)