HEROINE

By Andrew Frost

Official Website

If painting circular pictures is problematic, spare a thought for artists who attempt to also paint on convex glass or perspex. It’s a punishingly tricky prospect, and so it’s doubly amazing that Camille Hannah’s show Heroine – an exhibition of eight circular, oil on convex Perspex abstracts – manages to pull it off. In essence, Hannah’s final paintings are evidence of the reverse of her process, the gestural paint strokes, details and other ‘foreground’ features are the first laid down, while the backgrounds and other effects are the last.

Hannah’s playful titles hint at a possible interpretation of her abstracts: Lily of the Valley, Oleander and Opium [each 2014] each take their titles from flowering plants with not just toxic, but also mind altering effects, and when combined with Daphne [2014], alluding to the Greek myth of the nymph transformed into a an evergreen tree, the artist’s suite of paintings reflect a process of transformation not just in their making but also in their meaning. Hannah’s paintings are processes caught under a dome, once fluid, but now frozen in another form.

Artereal Gallery, Rozelle
Pic: Camille Hannah, Bella Donna, 2014. Oil on convex Perspex, 40cm diameter.