Hannah Parr

Hannah Parr’s education began in 2003 as a graphic design student at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. However, her education in fine arts came about as a self-taught artist in Berlin and a consequential artist-in-residence in the Dominican Republic. Those formative times were deeply shaped by collecting and sorting materials, typically from domestic or manufactured sources. Those experiences remain alive in my practice through continual collaboration with materials, predominantly wood. Eventually, in 2020 she obtained an MA in Fine Arts at Zürich University of the Arts.

Since living in Switzerland, she works with red and white cut construction site barricade slats. Generating a pallet of forms by cutting them into geometric shapes and fine slivers. The reclaimed slats are readily painted and in various stages of life, providing a diverse range of textures and tones of red and white. With these deconstructed elements, she builds up transcendent chromatic interplays of gesture and topographical scapes directly out of construction site materials to disrupt the boundaries they serve to delineate. Abstraction is born out of her handling of the wood. Her body is closely tied to these highly physical manoeuvres, which function on the one hand as a kind of obliteration, and on the other, a tender ablution. The process of undertaking these works is lengthy and multi-dimensional, simultaneously methodical and intuitive. An uneasy combination of separation, exposure, and confinement manifests into mental maps that endlessly challenge the boundaries of place, memory, feeling, and formalism. She calls this work method her remedy for painting.