Hannah Heilmann: Red Drawings

The exhibition Red Drawings begins with a suite of red drawings: a bedroom interior with a nude person fumbling with stick figures - or, more precisely, trying to put them on as if they were clothes. The stick figure is impossibly tight to get into, and along the way different visions arise: something like a birth, a murder, a love scene. The drawings balance the figurative with something more diagrammatic and psychedelic, hinting at causality without any real conclusions - just a series of shifts in states of body and soul.

 

"I, the artist, have asked myself: how much privacy can the works bear? If I pour it all in, how much runs back out? Does the personal run off and leave the political behind? The drawings are about masking, neurodivergence, time, parenthood, identity, grief, acceptance, anger. Where my earlier work circled clothing, consumption and the environment, the red drawings are a narrowing of focus: they stare at the political private, at structures so strange and cramped and skewed. Around the suite have gathered later works: calendars built from the date-clips off bread bags; kitchen-table expressionism from a family falling apart and pulling itself together again; sunflowers, now a symbol for invisible disabilities; mirrors and windows flowing together. And a dancing witch who has internalised the stick figure, made it her rattling skeleton, and traded her body for an angry, euphoric agency."
- Hannah Heilmann

 

At the opening, Hannah Heilmann and Sally-Ginger Brockbank will be cooking together in the back; it will last until someone has to go or the food is eaten. Sally-Ginger Brockbank (UK) is a chef who studied art, culture, and gender, and has been a partner in conversations over the past year of Heilmann's work.

We look forward to seeing you at the opening!