Hannah Ireland
Hannah Ireland’s gestural and expressionist paintings hint at personhood and individual character. Figures don devilish smirks, exaggerated black eyelashes, or smushed-to-the-photocopier type noses.
Hannah Ireland (Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi) is a contemporary artist, born in 1995 and lives in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland
Hannah is a portraitist in a very loose sense of the word. Her work bears the hallmarks of the genre in that they hint at personhood and individual character. The spacing of features such as eyes, lips, and nose are roughly around where they should be. Or just enough for them to be read as faces. Figures don devilish smirks, exaggerated black eyelashes or smushed-to-the-photocopier type noses. In this way, Hannah is simultaneously evasive and generous with the information she decides to dole out. It’s evasive as you’re not ever really afforded certainty at what you’re looking at, but it’s generous in that I don’t think certainty is the point. The open-endedness of it all allows the viewer their own interpretation.
Part of the murkiness of Hannah’s painterly information lies in the process itself. A key component of the artist’s practice is a method of painting on glass, sometimes on found or abandoned windows. This format calls for a painting in reverse. Whereas building pigment up on canvas or some other opaque surface means the foreground is often painted last, painting on glass means the initial brush strokes appear first and the background is built up in layers behind it. With Hannah’s work on canvas, she first uses her familiar glass painting technique to build up paint and composition which in turn is pressed or printed onto another surface. From there, she works and reworks into the image. This multi-step process allows the potential for abstraction, ambiguity and spontaneity with the resulting portraits embodying a vagueness that encourages speculative analysis.
Hannah Ireland
It feels so good to be alive
Jhana Millers Gallery
2022
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Plus 1
15 May - 7 Jun 2025Jhana Millers presents Plus 1, a group exhibition where a selection of gallery artists each invite a creative companion to exhibit alongside them.Read more -
Summer Selection – Portraits
29 Jan - 15 Feb 2025Read more -
Editions
9 May - 1 Jun 2024Jhana Millers is pleased to present their first print exhibition featuring a group of represented artists.Read more -
Hannah Ireland, Tossing & Turning, Aotearoa Art Fair
18 - 21 Apr 2024Jhana Millers is please to present a solo body of works by Hannah Ireland (Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi) at the Aotearoa Art fair 2024.Read more -
FIVE
7 - 29 Jul 2023Jhana Millers is pleased to present a group exhibition of work by the gallery's represented artists to celebrate the gallery's 5th anniversaryRead more -
Hannah Ireland, Wet Stairs
13 Apr - 6 May 2023Jhana Millers presents Wet Stairs by Hannah Ireland, a new body of paintings on translucent silk made with fabric dye.Read more -
Summer Selection
25 Jan - 11 Feb 2023Jhana Millers reopens for 2023 with a selection of works by gallery artists.Read more -
Hannah Ireland, It feels so good to be alive
26 May - 18 Jun 2022Jhana Millers Gallery is pleased to present It feels so good to be alive by Hannah IrelandRead more -
Group Exhibition, THE BIG THREE
9 - 31 Jul 2021Group Exhibition, THE BIG THREE. Exhibition at Jhana Millers Gallery, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington, Aotearoa New ZealandRead more -
Hannah Ireland, Stuck in the mud
13 May - 5 Jun 2021Hannah Ireland, Stuck in the mud. Exhibition at Jhana Millers Gallery, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington, Aotearoa New ZealandRead more
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Meet Hannah Ireland
The Artpaper, August 2, 2024 -
Portraits in Hamilton
Peter Dornauf, EyeContact, February 15, 2022 -
Hannah Ireland, Stuck In The Mud: Making Faces
Lachlan Taylor, Exhibition essay, May 13, 2021 -
Award winners announced for Molly Morpeth Canaday Award Painting and Drawing 2021
The Big Idea, February 15, 2021 -
Award Winners - Molly Morpeth Canaday Award Painting and Drawing 2021
Molly Morpeth Canaday Award, February 14, 2021 -
Cheap wine
Window Gallery, June 1, 2020
