Harry Payne is an artist based in England whose practice spans immersive installation, emerging technology and material craft to explore archive, heritage and memory. Holding a BA in Fine Art and an MA in Contemporary Art and Archaeology, his work sits at the intersection of the historical and the speculative, excavating hidden or overlooked histories and imagining forward into the futures they might shape.

At the heart of his practice is a preoccupation with whose histories are told, how they are carried forward, and what power they hold over the present. Working with real-time systems, interactive environments and found and archival material reincorporated through technology, he creates spaces where history is not preserved but reactivated, brought back into contact with living bodies and present moments. Audiences move through these environments as participants rather than observers, their presence becoming part of what the work is.

Increasingly, personal memory and lived experience have become the core of this inquiry. For a long time he kept himself deliberately at a distance from his work. He now treats his own life as archival material, as legitimate and as loaded as any institutional collection. The personal and the collective, the intimate and the structural, are held in productive tension, asking what it means, as a working-class queer man, to locate yourself within histories that were never made with you in mind, and to insist on your place within them anyway.