2024 - Ellie Hannon
Ellie Hannon
WAY / FIND
28.06.24 ~ 28.07.24
Way / Find presents a personal archive of impressions, investigating the thinking rhythms of walking and drawing. In this series, the material process of drawing mirrors movement through place and a quiet introspection. Rivers, tracks and paths of light oscillate between finding and feeling, sensing and seeing, moving and mark making. They occupy the image similarly to the way that our bodies contain emotions.
Linked in practice, walking, and drawing both generate a rhythm of emotional mapping and un-mapping, where the physical passage of moving through a landscape echoes the passage of thoughts, as if the mind too is a landscape. Drawing becomes a process of remembrance, switching from intent to instinct, lines and marks assembled on the paper.
In the bush I notice temporality and unpredictability; cloud movements across the sky and their shadows carpeting the ground, a meandering insect mark etched on a tree, a confused line of ants zigzagging across red sand and a length of grass forming its own drawing as it moves in motion with the wind.
In the city I notice random dirt trails that dart between the right angles of concrete and asphalt, a trace of city dwellers yearning for choice. The tension that exists between nature and the urban environment is seen in these slowly eroding desire paths, where a soft emerging autonomy contrasts with the hardness of infrastructures. I see my freshly landed footsteps contribute to this act of choice, certain and deliberate, written over earlier foot-tracks in the dust.
I know the paths that I trace are not the only paths, and that walking brings me choice. As the path, time and events unfold, walking becomes a metaphor for navigating the complexities of the world; walking is a natural action, an investigation of the world without being consumed by its tensions.
- Ellie Hannon
Photography : Bonnie-Grace (Courtesy of the artist)
Ellie Hannon’s work navigates both physical and emotional space, tracing a path through nature, personal experience, and artistic processes. At the heart of Hannon’s latest exhibition, Way/Find, is an engagement with way-finding, a term associated with navigating unfamiliar spaces, whether geographic or psychological. Using the notion of way-finding, Hannon’s works reference navigating through both the physical environment and internal terrain of emotional experience.
The works in Way / Find are not representations of landscapes in a factual sense, but rather renderings of emotions, and memories, imbued with the kind of intuition and sensitivity that defines Hannon's practice. Hannon’s work oscillates between reality and the abstract, where emotional experience of a place is often more significant than the physical attributes of that place itself. The natural symbols she incorporates—rivers, trees, the sun, pathways—are often drawn from memories, but they are not fixed representations of reality. Instead, they take on an emotive fluidity, moving between abstract and figurative.
Hannon’s approach to the natural world is decidedly symbolic, transforming elements of the landscape environment into portraits of emotional states. Rivers, trees, sun, moon, and pathways represent relationships, personal growth, and moments of reflection. These symbols are translated through Hannon’s visual language creating a fluid exchange between the literal and the metaphysical realm of our internal dialogue. The trees in her work are not merely entities of nature; they are characters, animated by both natural forces and brought to life through our perception and imagination. This treatment of nature as a language of emotion is central to Hannon’s practice. In works such as Walking Towards the Sun in Mud, Hannon uses colour and form to evoke a visceral sensation of struggle and perseverance. The rich orange and yellow palette is not meant to reflect the reality of the sun’s hues but to encapsulate the emotional experience of trudging through a difficult and muddy journey toward something hopeful—an experience that is universal, yet deeply personal. Colour serves as an emotional lexicon and becomes a vehicle for conveying internal states— they do not adhere to the natural palette of the environments, they are intuitively composed and selected to represent recollections of moments of ponderance. Bright, bold, and sometimes jarring colours disrupt the viewer’s expectations, creating a subtle sense of unease that invites the viewer to look beyond the recognisable symbols of nature and into a space of introspection.
Hannon’s practice of using pastels and oil sticks reflects her integrated way of working, simultaneously creating whilst exploring nature and spending time in deep reflection. Once returned to the studio the process of creation begins with a unique method of colour-washing the paper with pigment resulting in a richly textured, dense, matte surface - almost like a mirror of colour. This foundation allows for the overlay of additional oil sticks and pastels onto a background that sparks the energy and tone of the work. The choice of oil pastels as a medium for this body of work was both to create a fluid and intuitive process and to expand the available palette. Oil pastels don't require time spent mixing paints, allowing Hannon to be able to respond to her intuition during the moment of creation and at random, and at any moment, create a mark in response to every thought. The medium allows for this unique process of call and response between emotional content and raw intuition.
The success of Way / Find is found in Hannon’s ability to compose an emotional experience that presents an invitation to get lost in the process of navigating both the physical and emotional landscape. The colours, marks and compositions in Hannon’s work form an emotional cartography, a representation of feelings that are typically fleeting, intangible, and hard to define. This mapping, much like wayfinding, is a search for meaning and self-understanding.
– VERITY LEES