In 2024 Hannah completed her teacher training at The Archbishop's school in Canterbury and travelled to Uganda to deliver workshops at the Remand Centre with the charity Jenga. Her artwork through this experience has been heavily influenced by the spirituality she found in the connections between peple in Uganda and the authenticity in the volunteers she met. This trip was followed by a personal investigation: visiting Athens, to further explore her understanding of the Parthenon marbles and their original cultural context. Facing divisions within herself: her ability to be authentic, her convictions with regards to christian faith, and her desire for the Parthenon marbles to be returned combined with her personal love of visiting them in their current display in the British Museum, Hannah dwelt on the in-between truths. She created artworks that do not attempt to explain these hyperboles, but rest in a lingering state that showcases a deeper truth of existence in their flux.
In 2024 Hannah completed her teacher training at The Archbishop's school in Canterbury and travelled to Uganda to deliver workshops at the Remand Centre with the charity Jenga. Her artwork through this experience has been heavily influenced by the spirituality she found in the connections between peple in Uganda and the authenticity in the volunteers she met. This trip was followed by a personal investigation: visiting Athens, to further explore her understanding of the Parthenon marbles and their original cultural context. Facing divisions within herself: her ability to be authentic, her convictions with regards to christian faith, and her desire for the Parthenon marbles to be returned combined with her personal love of visiting them in their current display in the British Museum, Hannah dwelt on the in-between truths. She created artworks that do not attempt to explain these hyperboles, but rest in a lingering state that showcases a deeper truth of existence in their flux.
2024
THE PROMISED LAND
Height (cm): 162 Width (cm): 102 Depth (cm): NA (not yet stretched canvas) Materials: Canvas, Oil paint
In 2024 I visited my friend Asher who was working in Uganda. While there, I was able to see the relationships and ease she had grown with the culture around her. This painting is from a photo of a moment that encapsulated the authenticity of connections I saw there. While hiking in Sipi, we met three boys doing hand-less cartwheels over shrubs in crocs or bare feet. Asher took out her phone and filmed them - she beckoned them over and showed them the footage, which created this moment. The shapes of their bodies, and freedom of their movement was authentic and childish, free and joyful. I have used a blue outline around the figures. Blue to express the energy passing between my friend and the boys, a colour with richness of intimacy and entrenched meaning seen in mythologies through the centuries. (MAVOR, Carol. 2013) Their figures' colours dance with the colours in the grass and trees: they touch nature.
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UGANDAN IN THE FORREST 1
Height (cm): 115 Width (cm): 69 Depth (cm): NA Materials: Oil Paint on Paper
Hiking up Sipi in Uganda through villages this man was uninterested in me as I walked through his garden, sitting planted into the ground as if he himself was a part of the forest. The way the light mingled with the leaved onto his head made his place in nature seem spiritual as his existence as a part of his surroundings was the most natural and true state. Uganda inspired constant feelings of Eden, a place where the war between creation and humans was not being fought, pre-fall, and this man seemed more truly human than I could comprehend. With a limited palette and areas of the paper visible, he falls in and out of his surroundings as he seemed to exist both in the spiritual and physical
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UGANDAN IN THE FORREST 2
CHRIST
Height (cm): 81 Width (cm): 101 Depth (cm): 1.5 Materials: Oil paint on canvas
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Taken from the opening scene of Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, this piece plays with the whitewashed image of the Christian saviour and aligns him with Jarman’s gay identity which is intended to make a portion of the christian community uncomfortable in order to challenge their perception of Christ. The dying face of Caravaggio makes a reference to the canon of Christian art depicting the dying or dead Christ and draws attention to the fetishisation of the saviours suffering.
ATHENA
Height (cm): 48 Width (cm): 37 Depth (cm): 2 Materials: Stolen tea tray
Sanded onto a stolen tray from the British Museum's Cafe is the ghost like face of an Athena stature in Athens at the Parthenon Museum. I've grown up visiting the British Museum to draw the Parthenon marbles, and have always been aware of their heritage, and the heritage of most of the Museum's artifacts - stolen. In a visit, I experimented with the process of stealing something from the British Museum. Wondering if I would feel guilt, or if I'd feel some pleasure in stealing soothing from a building that has so much it has stolen in it. Wondering if I would feel justice. It felt irrelevant. My fascination with Parthenon marbles took me to finally visit Athens. I saw this head. It has red-brown tracks down from the eyes, like tears, where her copper eyelashes had degraded. I felt that she was stoically weeping, as if for the lost statues. To represent her on the tray, I chose not to add paint, but to steal layers of its finish through sanding