Exhibitions Hannah Quinlivan Nocturne 8th December 2020 - 13th February 2021

We are delighted to present Hannah Quinlivan's seventh solo exhibition at FLG. Since graduating from ANU School of Art in 2013 with first class honours she has exhibited in Australia, Britain, Berlin, Italy, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and the United States.

CATALOGUE ESSAY BY ELLI WALSH 2020
Harnessing the vast generative potential of line, Hannah Quinlivan translates contemporary experience into abstracted sequences that poke at the parameters of drawing. Formal qualities of light, shadow, shape and texture conjure subtle symbolic currencies that synthesise intimate moments from the artist’s own life with broad collective affairs.

Developed throughout the tumultuous year of 2020, Quinlivan’s new series of ‘spatial drawings’ brings together wire and LED installations tracing the vicissitudes – personal and shared – of ecological and economic crises. While many of the artist’s earlier pieces were ephemeral – enlisting decomposable materials such as salt and tape, as well as performative elements – the works in ‘Nocturne’ signal a new emphasis on permanence. Crafted from hand-cut acrylic sheets, heated and moulded with aluminium wire, they emblematically fix our fears firmly in place at a time when climate change is no longer a distant threat; it is here and now, vehement and permanent.

Hannah Quinlivan, Desiderium 1, 2020

Observing the fissures in collective consciousness wrought by recent disasters, Quinlivan has been trying to gather and translate, in visual form, the structure of a feeling pertinent to a particular time and place. Here she engages with Ben Anderson’s phenomenological concept of ‘the affective atmosphere’, looking at the tensions settling on life after periods of crisis. Anderson suggests that atmospheres are not solely located in material environments nor in the human body, but they emerge from the resonances between these components; they are ‘always in the process of emerging and transforming’. Quinlivan responds to this idea by constructing undulating organic forms that twist and turn in amorphous loops, evading fixed modes of being. Transmissions of fear and anxiety in an era of instability manifest in the piercing spatio-materiality of wire and acrylic, yet these materials are configured by Quinlivan with such tenderness and empathy that they are not without promise, and hope. ‘There is the realisation that we take so much for granted’, reflects Quinlivan, ‘We are needing to re-examine how we live and support each other … to find the fortitude to care for each other through the uncertain future’.

Germinating during the height of the Summer wildfires, the works in ‘Nocturne’ respond to the slow unravelling of our ecology. In Shroud, rippling coils of smoke curl around each other like some sort of twisted ouroboros. There is no beginning and no end here, only a ceaseless cycle. Embalmed in the work is the artist’s own experience of the dense plumes that shrouded and penetrated her home in Canberra for two months, forcing her to tape up the windows and protect her family. In a similar sense, the woven black forms of the title piece Nocturne resemble the exoskeleton of a space that has been internally burnt, pillaged. Silhouetted vertical forms dangle from the ceiling like spectral presences, or absences, conflating the formlessness of smoke with the solidity of charcoal. This work charts a changed and changing ontology – the affective atmosphere – in which known modes of feeling and being have evanesced into distant clouds. We have entered a new time wherein presence rubs up against absence in a warm anthropogenic friction, destabilising the future that once was.

Hannah Quinlivan, Nocturne (3D Install), Dormant 1 & 2 (floor), Compression 2 (back left), Desiderium 2 (back right), 2020

Choreographing light and line into a cathartic tangle, Desiderium asks its audience to pause. To take time. To look. Tracing our eyes along the serpentine LED strand is an exercise in absolving the futures we once possessed – of realising that the path before us is not straight but profoundly contorted. And, yet, there is still light to cling onto; a muted hope. We are not yet in darkness.

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Hannah Quinlivan graduated from the Australian National University with a Bachelor of Visual Arts in 2013 and is currently a PhD candidate within the ANU School of Art & Design. She has participated in a number of international group and solo exhibitions including the international survey of contemporary textile art MINIARTEXTIL Como, Italy (2019) and her solo exhibition Impulses, Restraints, Tones at New York’s Jan Kossen Contemporary (2018).
Within Australia she has recently been invited to exhibit her installations at Contour554, Canberra Public Art Biennial, Canberra (2020), the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra (Uncertain Terrain, 2019 and Arrhythmia, 2016), Canberra Museum and Art Gallery (Anatomy of Drawing 2017). Major public art projects she has undertaken include creating a site specific installation for Design Canberra, City Walk (2020) and producing a series of unique site-specific artworks for each of the Canberra Light Rail Network stations (2018)

She has been a finalist in the Alice Prize (2018, 2014), the Churchie Art Prize (2017), and the Calleen Art Award (2017) and her work is represented in a number of collections including the National Gallery of Australia, The Australian High Commission (Singapore), ACT Legislative Assembly Art Collection (Canberra), the Arthur & Suzie Roe Collection, Deakin University Art Collection, The Australian National University, KPMG Art Collection, Shire of East Pilbara West Australia, Philip Cox Collection, Ormond College Collection, and various private collections.

HANNAH QUINLIVAN PROFILE
DOWNLOAD BIO / CV (PDF)

Hannah Quinlivan
Fallow 2 2020
powder coated steel
Free standing sculpture
70cm x 110cm x 90cm

Hannah Quinlivan
Epicormic 1 2020
aluminium
110cm x 55cm x 55cm

Hannah Quinlivan
Epicormic 2 2020
aluminium
110cm x 55cm x 55cm

Hannah Quinlivan
Compression i 2020
aluminium, acrylic and shadow
154cm x 247cm In artist's studio

Hannah Quinlivan
Desiderium 1 2020
acrylic, aluminium and LEDs
190cm x 306cm x 30cm

Hannah Quinlivan
Desiderium 2 2020
acrylic, aluminium and LEDs
156cm x 207cm In artist's studio

Hannah Quinlivan
Compression 2 2020
acrylic and ink on Belgian linen
150cm x 180cm

Hannah Quinlivan
Exposure 1, 2 & 3 2020
acrylic and ink on Belgian linen
180cm x 450cm
(triptych)

Hannah Quinlivan
Dormant 1 & 2 2020
acrylic and ink on wood
240cm x 240cm
(diptych)

Hannah Quinlivan
Nocturne 2020
acrylic, rubber and aluminium
cm x cm
dimensions variable
9 component parts
$POA