About

Hannah Lee Hall lives and works in St. Paul, MN

Statement:

My work is about touch and change. Each piece is formed through an accretion of sand, paper pulp, string, and detritus. I feel them out as I go, letting each piece develop its own internal logic, like my hands are stumbling through an invisible maze. Some contain multitudes of layers, mostly unseen, informing the surface from below. I am an amasser of remnants and broken bits, and likewise my paintings are entrenched with debris. They contain residues from my life. My process is sculptural and regenerative; the excess of one painting often seeps into the next. My love of textiles informs my method of dyeing paper fiber, my use of pattern and repetition, and the woven nature of these compositions.

I imagine forms that could have lived inside the body. That might have been buried, then dredged up from the earth, or spit out partially digested. The terrestrial and the visceral share a common language. I am trying to transcribe it. Mostly I am left with more questions. Are these paintings the byproducts of an unseen activity? Or are they systems themselves: infinite feedback loops; or receivers, picking up obscure frequencies. Sometimes I think they are homemade distress signals, bleating out: Please accept these frantic transmissions from a brief being, whose body is more microbe than human, whose organs are speckled with plastic, who is caught in a state of becoming and rotting, who is shedding and absorbing and leaking into everything everywhere they go.