Hannah James

Hannah James received her master’s degree from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam in 2014.
Her recent solo and group exhibitions include:
Resting Bitch Face (Attent, Rotterdam, 2016);
Heads (Pracownia Portretu, Łódź, 2016);
Sinistra di Mano sulla testa, Object Held Against Right Thigh (The Bluecoat, Liverpool, 2016);
Non vedi quanto sono grandi queste lumache? (Chert, Berlin, 2015);
and wow! – Tessuto? – No? Entrando nel (sub) Textiles (Künstlerhaus, Graz, 2015).

She has participated in several international residencies, including Triangle France (Marseille, 2016) and Rupert (Lithuania, 2015).

Her work investigates the relationships we form with ourselves, others, and with both natural and artificial environments.

It reflects on how identities are constructed and challenged, through themes such as power, control, trust, vulnerability, and fear.

Her research touches on pedagogy, gender, representations of nature, and interspecies relationships.
During her residency at Rupert, she created a film set in a forest — a symbolic and ambivalent space, both exotic and familiar, liberated and controlled.

The film was later presented as part of a broader installation that questioned binary distinctions often made between human/nature, organic/technological, female/male.

As the artist explains: “My work examines the complex relationship between painting and sculpture,
playing with both the illusionist qualities of painting and the inextricably physical — and ‘real’ — qualities of sculpture.
Both Whale and Triangle evoke a mood of understated theatricality, functioning as miniature props within a stage.”