HOGCHESTER ARTS

Hannah Hughes (b. 1975) is a London-based visual artist working across collage, photography and sculpture. Her work explores relationships between image, form and language, focusing on the potential of negative space, and the salvaging and re-use of found materials.

 

Her research takes root from histories of recycling and archaeology of discarded materials, where value is found on the sidelines. It is in part a response to ‘Femmage’, a term coined by Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer in the 1970s to describe covert art practices from matter found in the home, reconsidering our relationship to domestic materials today, and how these can be re-configured.

 

Hughes’s practice involves strategies of fragmentation and reconstruction. Her two-dimensional collages are often described as either flat sculptures or sculptural photographs. The shapes in the collages originate from images of peripheral, ‘negative’ areas surrounding figures and objects, which have evolved into an ongoing regenerative alphabet of forms. In these, she examines edges within the photographic image through cuts, layers and seams, intersecting their surfaces and creating internal borders to be viewed fully through movement.

 

She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Gloucestershire, and her practice-based research centres around processes of fragmentation and strategies of re-fitting within the areas of collage, sculptural photography and ceramic sculpture. Hughes graduated from the University of Brighton in 1997 and her work has since been exhibited internationally. Her first book Mirror Image was published by Jane & Jeremy in 2023; and she has participated in two collaborative publications with artist Dafna Talmor, Glossaries, published by Folium in association with Sid Motion Gallery, (2023) and Glossaries II, as part of Emic Units 1, published by Shibboleth, 2023). Her work is included in Material Immaterial, (2018-20) an experimental publication by Rodrigo Orrantia, which has included live presentations at Cosmos, Arles and Offprint, Paris; and Look At This If You Love Great Photography: A critical curation of 100 essential photos by Gemma Padley, (Ivy Press, 2021). 

​

​

Selected Exhibitions

Solid Slip, Robert Morat Galerie, Berlin, Germany (2024)

Glossaries: Hannah Hughes & Dafna Talmor, Sid Motion Gallery, London (2022-23)

Monochrome, Coleman Projects, London (2022)

The State of Things, Landskrona Foto Festival, Sweden (2022) Photo50: No Place is an Island, curated by Rodrigo Orrantia, London Art Fair (2022)

An eXhibition of SMALL things with BIG ideas, White Conduit Projects, London (2022)

Entractes #15, The Eye Sees, Arles, France (2021)

Summer Camp, Eastside Projects, Stream digital online platform (2021)

Gleaners: Olivia Bax & Hannah Hughes, Sid Motion Gallery, London (2020)

Super Flatland, White Conduit Projects, London (2020)

New Formations, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, USA (2020)

The Office of Revised Futures, Format International Photography Festival, Derby (2019)

The Truth in Disguise, Geste, Paris, France (2019)

A Romance of Many Dimensions, Sid Motion Gallery, London (2018)

The Momentum, curated by Saturation Point Projects, Angus-Hughes Gallery, London (2018)

Concealer, curated by Tom Lovelace, Peckham 24, Copeland Gallery, London (2018)

These Fingers Read Sideways, (Monomatic), Fettes College, Edinburgh (2018)

Where One Form Began Another Ended: Hannah Hughes & Darius Stein, The Bakery Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada (2016) 

​