she/her
Hannah Stoll
My work engages the convention of landscape painting with modern revelations in ecological thinking. Considered ecologically, landscape becomes a teeming extension of the self, holding countless sensory and temporal experiences. It becomes indistinguishable from portraits and arrangements of fruit. Painting is as old as cultural ideas about the way humans fit into ecology: I work within this tradition as a way to question these dominant socialized perceptions.
The paintings are built from layered drawings and glazes, observed contour, and invention. As they evolve, I continually negotiate each element’s relationship to nameable forms. I conflate qualities of scale ranging from micro to macro, and rework edges as membranes that merge or contain. Forms open up as deep empty space and breathe and crawl as living things. Pigment and fabric are laid bare while contributing to the depth and shape of images.
At the core of this work is an interest in bodies and ecosystems as both living and habitable places. Despite the reality that they are, many people seem to share my feeling of an alienating and excruciating distance. I think of it as the longing to inhabit, and I searched for it by painting a living place that is both seductive and inaccessible through its obfuscation. This longing, a carrot on a string, may approach a biological survival instinct that can activate the life of painted forms.
Mountain of Faith, 2024.
Oil on canvas, 10 × 12 in.
Fertilizer, 2024.
Oil on canvas, 36 × 36 in.
Concentrations, 2024.
Oil on canvas, 48 × 36 in.
Smile, 2024.
Oil on canvas, 12 × 16 in.