Hi! This is Ale.
I would like to translate for you an article that Miss Toyoda of Itoshima Arts Farm wrote about Hannah’s exhibition’s opening party.
In some way, we all looked like fish caught in a net. But unlike fish, we were having a lot of fun. In contrast with the softness that the materials used in this installation makes us feel, we visitors were being observed by a camera set above the entrance since the moment they come in.
You would make yourself at home while drifting around the gallery, and you would hear the shutter periodically. The camera registering our activity suddenly gave us, people wandering around and touching and feeling the installation, a different kind of consciousness.
Hannah explained that this installation was about the unstable relationship it generates by capturing the light and creating shadows. Some material resembling tape or string was hanging from the ceiling and diffusing the light, and its shape got changed in turn by the visitors.
And then the camera that cuts the ambiance periodically with its shutter. This work may be expressing the duality of things like pleasure and despair, light and shadow, or comfort and tension.
Hannah insisted that the installation was not yet complete. She would spend the following week further changing its shape, only calling it complete on the last day of exhibition.
Hannah is based in Australia. Before coming to Itoshima, she spent two months in Berlin, and one month in Singapore in a very creative streak. Maybe because she was coming from a place this different, or maybe because of the unstable weather that welcomed her in Itoshima, in this installation inspired by Itoshima’s Nijo it feels like she is expressing something different than other artists that got inspired by the same place.
I was thinking that these sinuous, mysterious ribbons looked like they took a lot of work to make, and Hannah told me the materials were from Nafco (a local hardware store). I was surprised to hear Nafco’s name from this beautiful Australian young woman!