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)