Hannah Murgatroyd
I See A Hunter
Oil on canvas
2021-21
Painting starts in the dream, a flicker at the edge of the eye. There is a feeling – the body is a vital force – the dream tells me this. There is no distance from the body to world, whether in violence or tenderness, nature, shoreline or cityscape, all hum together in the moment of being, in the act of surviving. After facing my own death in childbirth in 2019 and raising my first child under the solitary conditions of lockdown, I had to divest myself of the body within my work, to survive the losses of self in trauma and motherhood. I painted into the optical and physical solace of spaces, into the territories that now define my work: from green forests to umber cities to white temples, submerging landscape in a kind of drenched mark. I return time and again to my understanding of the canvas as a Temenos space. Temenos is the name of the temple space of Aphrodite, a sacred enclosure, an outdoor area of ground dedicated for worship. Sometimes I paint it literally; sometimes it’s in the act of making paintings in how Jung writes of Temenos: as a circle space, in which to safely bring the unconscious to light. I have emerged from these broken yet beautiful years unifying the figure with these landscapes, painting breathing images of muscle and bone connected to an old old history, mine, anyone’s. These mise-en-scène of single figure, multi-peopled and unpeopled compositions pivot between interior and exterior worlds, open to the dual possibilities of abstraction and representation, led mostly by women and children on some kind of quest: enduring, existing.
A graduate of the Royal College of Art and Royal Drawing School, Hannah is a mentor for Turps Art School. Shortlisted for the Waverton Art Prize and the Beep Painting Biennial in 2022, she was Highly Commended in the 2021 Contemporary British Painting Prize.
