The Second Hand is Turning

Time moves differently in Hannah Ireland’s paintings. Faces surface, dissolve, and re-form, held in a continual state of becoming. In this new body of oil paintings on canvas, Ireland works within a consistent portrait format—head and shoulders—establishing a shared structure through which each figure can unfold. Within these parameters, she draws on a personal vocabulary of marks, symbols, and gestures: an evolving visual shorthand through which memory, emotion, and sensation are translated into paint.

Ireland approaches portraiture not as a means of recording likeness, but as a way of navigating emotional and psychological terrain. Her figures exist in tension between concealment and revelation, distortion and clarity, emerging through processes of layering, revision, and intuitive response to material. Recognition is partial and unstable. At times the faces press forward toward the viewer; at others, they recede into fields of colour and gesture. The act of looking becomes reciprocal and unsettled—the viewer observes the painting, while simultaneously becoming aware of being held within its gaze. The body shifts from subject to landscape: a space to move through rather than simply observe.

Working across a sequence of similarly scaled canvases, Ireland embraces painting as a site of accumulation and discovery, allowing gesture and material to guide each composition. Acts of selection, flattening, and revision echo processes of cutting and pasting—revealing some elements while withholding others, and allowing each figure to remain in flux.

A single large-scale painting interrupts this measured rhythm. Operating as a structural and emotional axis within the exhibition, it gathers and expands the concerns of the surrounding works—shifting the encounter from the intimacy of the individual portrait toward something more collective, porous, and spatial. Here, portraiture opens outward, becoming not only an image of presence, but a field through which presence moves.

A poem by Ada Duffy accompanies the show.