Statement
My abstract oil paintings transform fragments of everyday life into dreamlike, otherworldly compositions. Beginning with overlooked textures, colours, and moments from my surroundings, I use photographs as points of departure, translating them into paint through layering, distortion, and gesture. Through this process, references dissolve, forming images that feel transcendent, with each painting developing its own presence and aura.
The works become amalgamations of memory rather than representations of place. Multiple moments are compressed into a single visual field, creating hallucinatory and fluid outcomes where forms emerge, shift, and recede. I am drawn to expressive, intuitive mark-making, allowing the movement of paint to guide the transformation from observed imagery to abstraction.
Sensuous, fluid and immersive qualities are central to my practice, both in colour and surface. These sensory qualities are heightened through the physical act of painting, yet altered in the transfer to the canvas, producing works that exist between the tangible and the imagined. Layers build slowly, carrying traces of time, gesture, and emotion, resulting in paintings that exist within a state of transition.
Within the pace of contemporary life, my work invites moments of pause and immersion. By blending memory, sensation, and observation, the paintings guide viewers to enter into an atmospheric space that blurs reality and abstraction, offering a quiet, immersive encounter with feeling rather than certainty.
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Hannah Wheeler
Born in 2003 in London, United Kingdom. Resides and works in Manchester, United Kingdom.
Education:
[2023 - present]: BA Fine Art, Manchester School of Art, United Kingdom
[2022 - 2023]: Foundation Diploma in Art & Design, Wiltshire College, United Kingdom.
[2020-2022]: UAL Level 3, Applied Art & Design, Bath College, United Kingdom.
Selected Exhibitions:
2024, Dual Realities (group exhibition), Whalley Range Scout Hut, Manchester, United Kingdom
2023, End of Year Show (group exhibition), Wilshire College, Trowbridge, United Kingdom
Website: www.hannahwheelerstudio.com
Email: info@hannahwheelerstudio.com