Hannah Turner-Duffin
A cage of my own making
Watercolour and synthetic dye on book page, 15x10cm,
2022
Hannah Turner Duffin’s practise is rooted in painting but incorporates craft, installation, textiles and print-making techniques, interested in creating a cyclical life-span for her paintings, each stage or ‘life’ resulting from ritualistic processes. Navigating ideas of the consumption of self within the painting; particularly the meditative/obsessive and accumulative experience of making through repetitive gestures and the devotional dialogue that it creates. Her paintings evoke not only their own crafting, but also a wide range of landscape associations, often made in response to the idea of her surrounding landscape, the feeling of passing through it and notions of transcendence that it evokes. As well as using recurring themes of the anthropomorphic power of plants and rocks to convey everyday life experiences or folkloric tales.
‘A cage of my own making’ is taken from my ongoing series ‘Rocks and Flora’. Painted on the pages of a seventies geology book of my father’s (a geologist) that I’ve carried around with me for about twenty years from studio to studio. These pages, upon the birth of my son, suddenly became fruitful surfaces to make sense of the sediments of everyday life, whilst navigating and digesting my recent launch into motherhood and family life, as well as my own childhood and relationships. The stones and minerals on the pages serve as symbols and conduits of emotion and memory, uninhibitedly holding space for my internal landscapes.
