Hannah Woodman
Biography
Hannah Woodman studied at Exeter College of Art and Design and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London University, before training to teach at the London Institute of Education, where she later took an MA in Museums and Galleries in Education. Working across Cornwall and Devon, her studio is based near Devon’s south coast. She has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at Panter & Hall, Tremenheere Gallery and JHW Fine Art, and annual open exhibitions at the Royal West of England Academy. Her work has been featured in the Sunday Telegraph, Country Life and BBC2’s Rick Stein’s Cornwall, and is held in private and public collections in the UK and abroad.
Artist Statement
I am a landscape painter using watercolour and gouache to render an abstracted stillness in the environment. My process starts with the elements and an attempt to capture the light, atmosphere and physicality of my surroundings, but evolves into something less tangible. Finding the space between a prescribed figurative approach and a more simplified, ambiguous one is the challenge I enjoy most, allowing the work to have lasting and multiple meanings.
I use daily drawing and sketching to familiarise myself with the local landscape to a point of reduced simplicity, so my studies become more about the asceticism of mark-making. Exploring negative space to render the intimacy of a scene may sound counter-intuitive, but I find omission encourages interpretation. Having grown up in Devon with Cornish heritage, I am embedded in the West Country, a place that combines the extremes of rural isolation with well-trodden tourist motifs. A strong motivation in my work is to avoid the picturesque and instead capture the visceral effects of the region’s most hidden corners.