Hannah Ireland, Running with Scissors : Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery

For Running With Scissors, Hannah Ireland has produced a new suite of watercolour and acrylic paintings on salvaged windows, which retain their existing frames. Ireland has been painting on glass since her second year at Elam School of Fine Arts, drawn to the physical and figurative slipperiness of this material approach. Speaking of this methodology, Ireland refers to the glass plates of scanners and photocopiers to describe a preoccupation with the ways information can be manipulated or translated. For the first time, paintings in Running With Scissors have been installed for viewing from both sides, supported by purpose-built walls. Prior to this, Ireland preferred to conceal the “rears” of her paintings (which she actually considers their fronts). 

The figures now characteristic of Ireland’s work “are not,” in her words, “you or me, but rather ‘them.’” Painted as though pressed against or into glass surfaces, these waggish, capricious figures come to comprise their domestic architectures—surface and subject, body and context now aptly integrated. Overt traces of painterly gesture and weathering of aged windows share in a deliberate evidencing of process and life. Ireland began sourcing discarded windows from her father in 2020, with a preference for those from colonial architectures. This domestic motif enters her paintings, carrying with it uneasy historical connotations that address the nature of subjected bodies in shifting personal and sociopolitical contexts. The vast emotional spectrum of Ireland’s figures register prominently in this respect, like residual psychological conditions, deeply enhanced by the artist’s aptitude for colour. 

There is a keen material enquiry in Ireland’s practice broadly, which she allows to guide her process in order to embrace inchoate possibilities. For her, the act of painting itself is integral to the shaping of its own outcomes. The self-determining agency of such an approach seems analogous to the independence of the figures that emerge in her paintings. Though they may be read conventionally as portraits, Ireland appears far more concerned with the vested interests of the torsos populating her works than the possibility of accurate representations. What are they doing? Where are they going? How are they feeling? And, perhaps most importantly, why do we care? 

James Gatt