by Paul Carey-Kent.
Written for his ‘Pauls Art World’ blogspot
Hannah Maybank’s dangerously beautiful mixed media paintings have flowers or hawkmoths as their starting point. Or do they? The floral works set out from a Christian name of significance to the artist, who then observes as the character of the painting falls in with or diverges from that of its inspiration. Maybank is technically adventurous, exploring such materials as ‘synthetic gold’, ‘Japanese glass pigment’ and ‘orasol’. There’s less of the latex peeling effect typical of her previous work, but there’s still a sense of vegetative growth not quite under control. That encourages environmental readings, but that dangerous beauty is the thing.
Top Ten On At The Moment — 01.06.14
Hannah Maybank was invited to feature as the subject for the Fine Art Profile in 2013/14′s Winter edition of the New York based journal ‘Creative Quarterly’ (issue 32).
Written by Poet Matt Black in response to Hannah Maybank’s body of work ‘Fontus’s Posie’, as part of the curated programme by Rose Lejeune for The Wirksworth Festival 2013.
If every petal was a second,
If every petal was a year,
If every petal was forever,
Meanings come and go, like seasons,
Like this year’s fashions, as roses
Gather layers, build up histories,
Remind us of love and beauty, blood, Christ, England,
White for Yorkshire, red for Lancashire,
But for now, for this moment, this rose is yours,
This painting is your garden,
This white anemone (love, luck, protection),
This oriental poppy (sleep, peace, death),
These lines, shades, washes and flashes of colour,
Absence and presence, belong to you,
These are the pictures of your days,
This garland, the garland of your morning,
Afternoon, evening, year, stand here,
This is your story, at this moment
Art and nature walk hand in hand,
Talking to each other, and saying
Isn’t it strange, how we reflect each other,
From flower, to beast, to the Earth, our mother,
And everything is meant to be,
For each of us, on our own,
And for all of us, together,
And has meaning, which then is gone,
Like a story, followed by silence,
Like a moment in the weather.
by Ian Massey.
An extract from the complete essay, which can be found in “Under The Greenwood : Picturing the British Tree
From Constable to Kurt Jackson”, Anne Anderson, Tim Craven, Della Hooke, Steve Marshall and Ian Massey.
Published by Samson and Company, Bristol 2013.
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Hannah Maybank discusses her work with infesting.net whilst resident artist at the Berwick Gymnasium Gallery. The interview took place via e-mail between December 2010 and March 2011, during one of the heaviest snow falls in Britain in living memory.
by Cherry Smyth.
To draw a tree. To draw a tree is a kind of waiting. Waiting for the space it occupies to change. Time passes as you draw. But too slowly to reveal the minute changes the tree is undergoing…
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by Katie Pratt.
Hannah Maybank’s paintings rely on an inherent sense of planning and organisation. She constructs a sense of place in a traditional pictureplane, but simultaneously undermines its intelligibility with devices such as pattern, repetition, impossible viewpoints and the physical detachment of the paint from the surface…
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by Karen Downey.
Written for ‘The Vacuum – Issue 19′ 2004.
Hannah Maybank exhibited six paintings in Queen Street Studio’s refurbished gallery between 6 August and 9 September. These paintings could be described plainly, and ambiguously, as abstract. Repeated, and variously scaled motifs of natural elements, bird’s wings, trees and mountains appear to be cut into, mounted onto and inserted under the main surface plane of the paintings. This surface is also, in areas, highly distressed; blistered, cracked and broken…
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