Lavinia Harrington (b.1986) is an Italian-British artist based in London. She received her Painting MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art (2024), an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, focusing on Venetian Renaissance painting (2010) and a BA in History of Art from the University of Oxford (2008). She is the recipient of the Audrey Wyckeham Prize for Painting and was shortlisted for the Chadwell Award (2024).

Lavinia is moved by how soft, vulnerable materials can hold and emanate deeply charged emotions. Through making, she is searching for ways to materialise sensation. The works that grow from this are not representations but embodiments. For this reason, questions of care and empathy are at the heart of her practice. Lavinia works directly with her hands, embedding pastel into paper, which she folds, unfurls, soaks and rubs until the tactile sensibilities of surface and structure resonate with the experiences she is exploring. Her works emerge from an accumulation of action and erasure, contemplation and somatic movement, and are guided by visceral reactions to colour.

Through her practice, Lavinia considers how the body stores and can transform trauma, how we exchange care and connection through touch, and the ramifications of touch. Above all, her work is sustained by a desire to engage with and share our astonishing capacity to empathise.