Hannah Knox
Hannah Knox, a British painter and Royal College of Art graduate, creates works blending portraiture, still-life, abstraction, and figuration. Her paradoxical paintings are figurative yet without figures, folded yet flat, evoking memory like a garment. She has collaborated with Versace, Burberry, and Bottega Veneta, with her works featured in their collections. Knox has exhibited widely, including at Hashimoto Contemporary, Frans Kasl Projects, and Ceri Hand Gallery. Her distinctive style captures the interplay of time, place, and object.
Artist Q & A
What draws you to the themes of materiality and identity in your work?
Materiality seems integral in these works; the starting point for making them comes from considering the strangeness of painting, both as an activity and as a canvas object. The basic structure of “paintings” in a traditional sense is fabric and colour: the linen of the surface and the colour of the paint substance that sits on it.
I’m curious about playing with this as a recursive loop, describing imagined fabric onto the existing actual fabric, creating a procedure or action that can repeat itself indefinitely, a thing within a thing, within a thing. A matrix of sorts.
The action of painting these works, in particular the furs and the knits, is a repetitive process much like the procedure of knitting the works in real life. The surface becomes active in rendering a garment, the weave or loop made with painted marks relating to the making of the thing it is describing.
Themes of Identity underlie the aim of these paintings, with the works becoming characters or actors, standing in for a bod in a room. They are shells used to house a story or contain a memory, exploring themes of culture, social status, wealth, positioning, desire, and fashion.
I love paintings that go right to the edge and fully occupy the canvas, allowing the viewer to see only the garment and not hint at an outfit, which is how apparel is often presented.
The aims for the format of these paintings go back to the same themes of considering the canvas as an object, or a sculptural form, as a material fabric surface and as a space to project an idea.
I like the garment to fit the proportions of the stretcher fully so that there are no external visual influences on how the object is interpreted, no body, imagined space, or table; the garment is floating in a void.
They exist as single items rather than an outfit as I hope this provides a broader space to project.
Read the full interview inside the Spring 2025 edition of Art Seen.
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