Nicola Harwood’s exhibition feels like a reckoning with adulthood. Across the paintings in this recent body of work, the viewer will encounter a world shaped by birth, slow decay and rebirth. The works speak to the long journey from conviction to compromise. Within that, struggle does not always deliver the reward you were expecting.

Rooted in the landscapes of the Okanagan and the Kootenays, Harwood’s paintings are shaped by regions where wilderness, myth, and urban life overlap. These are places that teach hard lessons about resilience, and adaptation. Mountains do not bend to will. Rivers do not always lead to safer ports. Forests are both secure and dangerous in equal measure.

Figures throughout the exhibition appear suspended within natural terrain, caught in the middle of their journey. Bodies cling, float, strain, merging with animals and elemental forces. Depicted in Species of Concern - a frog is grasped tightly by a human form as both subjects are impaled above harsh lands. Wild stallions encompass engaged bodies among a waterfall within the piece titled About to be Eaten. Are these characters traveling by certainty, instinct, or reckless abandon?

Harwood’s attraction to the mythos of the trickster is essential. The trickster - which takes many shapes - is a figure deeply embedded in West Coast and interior mythologies. Neither hero nor villain, the trickster disrupts order, exposes false certainty, and reveals truth through mischief, inversion, and unexpected consequence. Harwood’s work aligns closely with this logic. What appears destructive, humiliating, or absurd often becomes transformative. In adulthood, trickster logic replaces the naive ideology of youth into forced adaptation - offering insight only after disruption has occurred.

Religious iconography in the exhibition may heighten tension. Halos, angels, men of the cloth and humiliating poses appear as remnants of belief systems. Figures connected to these sacred poses are neither mocked nor revered. They exist as inherent characters of a story. Necessary in the process of shaping ideas of pain, virtue, gender, and endurance. Do these characters continue out of frame to complete their own journey?

Depending on your life experiences, the exhibition title, It Will Hurt Less If You Relax, can be literal, or loaded. To relax is not to escape pain, but to stop resisting the inevitability of a situation. It reflects a moment when fighting gives way to navigating - when survival becomes less about moral victory and more about learning how to live inside a moment. This is not resignation, but recalibration. Within this work care and connection persist. Figures support one another, touch, and hover close to one another. These moments suggest something more personal and quieter is taking place. 

In Paddling across a sea of Death, the Owl figure - calm, observant, perched atop a skull - embodies the wisdom that emerges after illusion has been shattered. This figure does not intervene. It is a witness. The skull beneath the figure becomes a foundation and reminder that our lives sit upon memories. 

It Will Hurt Less if You Relax can be read, as a colourful archive of becoming. What once felt urgent has softened into revealing an artist who has learned to witness and realign. The exhibition leaves us with a sense that our experiences do not vanish but transform over time.