Hannah Hall
Tea at Shirley's, 2023
96.5 x 96.5 cm
tablecloth, lace doilies, black tea, thread
Hannah Hall is a Naarm/Melbourne based artist creating textile-based work that investigates materiality, craft, domesticity, and memory. Influenced by modernist abstraction and late 20th century textile art history, expanded painting and craft practices collide, to create works that occupy a hybrid space between painting and textile. Traditional techniques such as smocking, slashing, pleating, ruffling, and tucking are applied at labour intensive scale to found or gifted materials including old clothes, bedsheets, curtains, and pillowcases. Each piece of material is altered with several staining techniques that use spices, fruits, vegetables, and synthetic pigments, which adopt household tasks where the Kitchen, Laundry, and Washing Lines become an extension of the studio. Using second-hand materials, each work contemplates the presence and absence of unknown moments, bodies, and people, from each material’s history. Hannah’s practice examines relationships between art and craft, revealing the spillages, intimacies, and complexities of textiles, in the unpredictable way they fold, drape, and absorb pigment, but also in the way they evoke memories and emotional responses.
Hannah Hall
Tea at Shirley's, 2023
96.5 x 96.5 cm
tablecloth, lace doilies, black tea, thread
Hannah Hall is a Naarm/Melbourne based artist creating textile-based work that investigates materiality, craft, domesticity, and memory. Influenced by modernist abstraction and late 20th century textile art history, expanded painting and craft practices collide, to create works that occupy a hybrid space between painting and textile. Traditional techniques such as smocking, slashing, pleating, ruffling, and tucking are applied at labour intensive scale to found or gifted materials including old clothes, bedsheets, curtains, and pillowcases. Each piece of material is altered with several staining techniques that use spices, fruits, vegetables, and synthetic pigments, which adopt household tasks where the Kitchen, Laundry, and Washing Lines become an extension of the studio. Using second-hand materials, each work contemplates the presence and absence of unknown moments, bodies, and people, from each material’s history. Hannah’s practice examines relationships between art and craft, revealing the spillages, intimacies, and complexities of textiles, in the unpredictable way they fold, drape, and absorb pigment, but also in the way they evoke memories and emotional responses.
This artwork is exhibited in Bloom: West End Grad Show, West End Art Space’s inaugural graduate exhibition. Presenting the work of 11 artists from the 2023 graduating cohorts of VCA, RMIT & Monash University, this showcase aims to give emerging artists a gallery platform, and to provide an entry point into the commercial art industry.
