about Hannah's artwork
I am a swimmer, diver, and free diver — always. The experience of being underwater has shaped how I see, feel, and move through the world. The shifting light, the weightlessness, the quiet that holds you — these sensations stay in the body long after you surface. They are where my paintings and installations begin.
My work translates the sensations of immersion into colour, movement, and space. I think through water: how it bends light, distorts distance, slows sound. These qualities become the language of my work — fluid edges, layered transparencies, changing surfaces that respond to light and movement. Each piece invites people to feel that sense of suspension, calm, and connection I find in the sea.
Growing up in industrial Teesside, the contrast of steelworks and luminous skies taught me to look for beauty in unlikely places. That contrast — between heaviness and light, chaos and stillness — still runs through my work. I use materials that shimmer and shift, pigments that flip with light, creating surfaces that change as the viewer moves. It’s important that people don’t just look at the work but experience it — walking around it, into it, or feeling its energy in space.
The sea gives me a way to think about art and about people. Both are alive, fluid, and constantly changing. My practice is about that meeting point: how the physical and emotional overlap, how light and colour can hold feeling. I want my work to offer people something sensory and restorative — not as escape, but as reconnection.
