Hannah Quinlivan’s Resonance at Grainger Gallery

Posted on 23 July, 2024

Hannah Quinlivan is a Canberra-based artist with international renown.

Since graduating from the Australian National University School of Art & Design in 2013, Hannah’s work has had global reach with exhibitions and public art commissions in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia.

Many Canberrans will already be familiar with Hannah’s work thanks to their daily commute. Each Light Rail stop between Civic and Gungahlin features a site-specific drawing by Hannah, informed by the unique rhythm of each stop and rendered in white ink printed directly onto the glass.

Hannah’s latest exhibition, Resonance, opened on Thursday 18 July at Grainger Gallery. Represented by Flinders Lane Gallery in Melbourne and Curatorial & Co in Sydney, this is the first time Hannah’s work will be commercially available to a Canberra audience – great news for local art collectors.

Photo courtesy of the artist and Grainger Gallery.

Resonance draws on Hannah’s longstanding interest in the structures of modern life, particularly ‘structure of feeling’, a term coined by writer and cultural theorist Raymond Williams to describe the ways that our material, social, sensory, and emotional worlds coalesce to create the character and atmosphere of a place and time.

While the form of each work corresponds with a particular locale, Hannah isn’t simply mapping the geographic nature of a place but instead seeks to capture – and convey – its unique atmosphere and ambiance.

Hannah’s artistic practice is multi-disciplinary, spanning across installation, painting and sculpture. Resonance includes painting and ‘spatial drawings’, where line takes on sculptural form in wire, acrylic, aluminum, and LED lights. Just as important as the physical nature of each work is the interplay of light and shadow that results in the spaces between.

Hannah’s artistic practice also delves into our cultural obsession with immediacy and individual experience – proliferated by social media and immersive art exhibitions such as Van Gogh Alive – and offers up an equally inviting, but more contemplative, alternative.

Photo courtesy of Grainger Gallery.

The exhibition coincides with the unveiling of Hannah’s latest public art commission, Life Force, recently installed in the new welcome hall of the Canberra Hospital Expansion project. Hand-moulded in her Canberra studio, Life Force pays tribute to significant bodies of water in and around Canberra – the Murrumbidgee, its tributaries, and Lake Burley Griffin – and the life they bring to our city.

Resonance is on now at Grainger Gallery until Sunday 4 August 2024.

Feature image: Hannah Quinlivan. Credit: Bridget Baskerville.