About Hannah Rowan
Notions of the vessel, tactility, material transformation and permeability flow through Hannah Rowan’s Mater Collects series, which includes works on paper and hand-built ceramics. The series of works are inspired by vessels and aquatic life forms of bivalve molluscs and octopus tentacles.
Hannah Rowan's work explores the slippery complexities of water that draws together a liquid relationship between the human body and geological and ecological systems. She uses a range of media including sculpture, installation, performance, video and sound to investigate the ephemerality and flux of materials that transmute into other forms. She is interested in exploring notions of bodies of water, vessels, animacy of matter and the temporal transformation of materials. She often works with water to catalyse transformation and visualize a continual state of becoming. Her work is informed by a Hydrofeminst perspective to understand all bodies of water as interconnected, aquatic entities weaving throughout her work suggest an intimacy and relationality across bodies of water.
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This artwork is unframed
Mater Collects is an extension of Mater, a comissioning body and research platform exploring materials. Hannah Rowan was comissioned to write a text Mater in 2022. View it here.
A percentage of all Mater Collects sales will go towards the commissioning of exclusive and groundbreaking new texts for Mater.
Hannah Rowan, Desert Vessel 13
Cyanotype on Cotton Paper
2021, Unframed, 50 x 40cm, Unique
Cyanotypes or sun prints are an early form of camera-less photography, where light-sensitive chemicals are painted onto paper and exposed to the sunlight and rinsed with water. They were used by 19h century Botanists to make archives of seaweed and flora and by Architects to make architectural blueprints. Hannah Rowan’s series of cyanotypes takes the archetypal symbolism of the vessel that she paints onto cotton paper before exposing to sunlight. The degree of blueness in the prints reflects the length of exposure to the sunlight. For ‘Desert Vessels’ she combined cyanotype processes with transparent prints of her photographs from the Atacama Desert. The cracked terrain of the desert contained within the vessel echoes the piecing together of fragile archaeological fragments of ancient pottery. The material processes involved in the making of cyanotypes reflect Rowan’s ongoing interests in working with elemental, alchemical and embodied processes.