Hannah Cooper
b. 1981, Sydney, Australia
Lives and works on Gundungurra Country, Bundanoon, Southern Highlands, NSW.

Hannah Cooper uses traditional cloth-making techniques to produce woven paintings. Production of “ordinary” domestic textiles has heavily influenced Cooper’s artistic work, which plays with (and pushes against) the formal language of geometric abstraction and the structural and creative constraints of weaving. An over-under grid is the basis of all weaving - Cooper’s work is rooted in the ability to emphasise or distort that very simple structure: to stay firmly on the grid or move off it. 

Cooper is a self-taught weaver, teaching herself basic techniques on a rigid heddle loom in 2017 and concentrating on simple plain weave blankets made from locally-sourced superfine merino wool. She now weaves on a 12-shaft countermarch floor loom, utilising more complex structures but maintaining a focus on using ethically-sourced fibres. Cooper naturally-dyes thread with plants and animals (leaves, barks, roots, flowers and insects) for use in her artworks.

In our rush to memorialise landscapes in digital form, we tend to miss the feel and experience of a place. We pixelate it, share it and wait for the likes to ping in to give us the sense of “I was there” satisfaction, but miss the essence of the place. By juxtaposing the improbably slow, laborious process of naturally-dyeing and weaving silk into a structured grid against a hastily-shot photograph, this series of work is a woven metaphor for our increasingly detached interactions with nature, and forms part of an ongoing conversation around how we exist in the world.

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