Harnessing the generative potential of line, internationally recognised artist Hannah Quinlivan’s installations translate contemporary experience into abstracted sequences that expand the parameters of traditional drawing techniques. Working with the formal qualities of light, shadow, shape, and texture her creative output synthesise intimate moments from the artist’s own life within broader collective issues.
Artist’s statement: They say that images of the past should fear a pencil’s touch. It is not revisionist history that we dread, but autobiography — a new assembly of old splinters and scraps of memory, the shuffling of that movable host of metaphors and metonyms into a different composition. When the past resurfaces, it can go off like a bomb and shatter solid certainties into fragments. New realities emerge from behind the smokescreen. The past is never done with us, or we with it.
Catalogue Essay by Sita McAlpine, 2022 When the world of travel and national exhibitions stopped in 2020, Hannah Quinlivan shifted her artistic focus from the global to the local and finally, the personal. This latest series was created from the kitchen table of her family home, and as her infant son crawled under her studio workbench. As these works took form, shared family memories bubble up out of the quietude.
What developed was a deeply personal series drawing on the threads of her family tree and its embedded memories. With a young family of her own, Quinlivan returned to her childhood as a source of inspiration, observing that memory is as malleable as her wire sculptures — made and remade, altered and extended — creating new realities and shifting identities.
Memory has long been a dominant theme in Quinlivan’s practice. She sculpts memory of place through light and shadows, movement and reflection. This recent body of work continues to focus on place memory and its ecology through an alternate lens of ‘home’ and the life of family within. It is through her childhood that home is brought to the fore in the form of place memory. Throughout the series runs a weft of contrasting lines reminiscent of both contoured landscapes and the loosening thread of an old family blanket. Like the thread of an old blanket, memories are woven, shaped and intersect with others’ and their recollections. It is in this moment when memories collide that the forgotten is remembered.
It is fitting that many of the artworks in this exhibition have grown and blossomed from nascent sculptures whose small and delicate origins are in stark contrast to the scale and complexity of what Quinlivan achieves. Notably, Deluge, began as a public artwork maquette and was expanded to create a shimmering sculpture of scale that exudes light as if charged.
This radiant work is juxtaposed against black ridges of new experimental work Splinters and Scraps of laser cut and moulded Perspex. The medium’s sharp lines are altered with heat guns, softening, then warping the Perspex with the pull of gravity. The result is sophisticated work with fluid contours, reminiscent of a human fingerprint or the topography of a map.
Quinlivan developed this series alongside a major public artwork Fluency commissioned by Mirvac in Brisbane. The extreme weather events of March 2022 halted the artwork’s install as the waters of the Brisbane River engulfed parts of the city, including the foot holds of the site of the installation. This experience of witnessing a climate change event raises the question - how do we share and hold memories as a collective to make change for our future?
The intricate lines and contours of Quinlivan’s latest body of work speak to the fluid nature of memories that from time to time inundate our lives like floodwaters. Amongst the works’ twisting wires and ridges is the personal narrative of family and home. Yet, to see this series as a collection of personal memories is to overlook its powerful undercurrent. This series, created at a time when as a society we are learning a new way of being in the world, Quinlivan’s works are testament to how place memories can be made and remade — questioning how we relate to the present, the past and the future.
ARTIST PROFILE:Hannah Quinlivan graduated from the Australian National University with a Bachelor of Visual Arts in 2013 and is currently a PhD candidate within the ANU School of Art & Design. Her practice has been recognised by curators and collectors alike for her skilful exploration of ideas around human movement, emotional cognition and time’s flowing passage.
She has participated in a number of international group and solo exhibitions including the international survey of contemporary textile art MINIARTEXTIL Como, Italy (2019), her solo exhibition Impulses, Retraints, Tones at New York’s Jan Kossen Contemporary (2018), Hong Kong Art Central (2017), the solo Pellucid at Colorado State University (2017) and a collaborative drawing performance entitled Immobilised at the Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, Berlin (2017). She won an ANU Scholarship to attend the conference, Time and Temporality, at Cambridge University (2016), where she concurrently exhibited an ephemeral, site-specific work Spatialisation at Pembroke College in the same year. She also participated in Project Field Trip, a touring exhibition travelling through Singapore, Philippines and Indonesia (2016). Within Australia she has held solo exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra (Uncertain Terrain, 2019 and Arrhythmia, 2016), the Town Hall Gallery in Melbourne (Delineation, 2019), the Canberra Museum and Art Gallery (Anatomy of Drawing, 2017), and at Deakin University, Melbourne (Travelling Light, 2017). Quinlivan has also participated in large group shows such as Contour554, Canberra Public Art Biennal, Canberra (2020), the Queensland College of Art’sDrawn to Experience: Survey of Australian and International Contemporary Drawing Practices (2015), Bega Valley Regional Gallery’s MOTION: The Body & Movement in Contemporary Art Practice (2015) and at Art Vault Mildura as part of their Australian Print Triennial (2015). Major public art projects she has undertaken include a sandstone engraving and ceramic print on glass at for the facade and awning of 275 George Street, Sydney (2021), 80 Ann St, Brisbane for Mirvac, creating a site specific installation for Design Canberra, City Walk (2020) and producing a series of unique site-specific artworks for each of the Canberra Light Rail Network stations (2018). She has been a finalist in the Alice Prize (2018, 2014), the Churchie Art Prize (2017), and the Calleen Art Award (2017). She was an artist in residence at both the Art at the Heart Residency, Shire of East Pilbara (2017) and the Zentrum fur Kunst und Urbanistik where she also completed a mentorship under the guidance of artist Chiharu Shiota (2017). She was the winner of the ANU College of Arts & Social Science Scholarship (2016), was also awarded a Jump Mentoring Program through the Australia Council for the Arts (2014), and arts funding with ARTS ACT (2014), which allowed her to establish a mentoring program for young Canberra arts graduates.
Quinlivan is represented in number of collections including the National Gallery of Australia, The Australian High Commission (Singapore), ACT Legislative Assembly Art Collection (Canberra), the Arthur & Suzie Roe Collection, Deakin University Art Collection, The Australian National University, KPMG Art Collection, Shire of East Pilbara West Australia, Philip Cox Collection, Ormond College Collection, and various private collections.
