Hannah Ireland
Hannah Ireland is a New Zealand contemporary artist who creates gestural and expressionist paintings. Her paintings have been exhibited throughout New Zealand, and she was featured in the triennial Aotearoa Contemporary Exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery in 2024. Her works are in the Arts House Trust collection, The Dowse Art Museum collection, and the Auckland University collection.
Background and education
Ireland is of Ngāti Hine and Ngāpuhi descent. She was born in Onehunga, and lives and works in Auckland.In 2022, she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Auckland.
Career
Art
Ireland is primarily a portraitist. She often paints on glass, sometimes repurposing found or abandoned windows. Painting on glass allows her painting process to showcase potential abstraction, ambiguity, and spontaneity. By building up thick layers of paint to create three-dimensional figures, she creates blurring boundaries between representation and abstraction. She also paints on canvas, but draws on the technique she uses when painting on glass so that the paint and composition is still built up in her specific style. When working with canvas, she often cuts and stitches parts of the canvas to create patterns and indentations that influence the compositions.She has taught this technique to classes before, having held an experimental painting workshop at the Gus Fisher Gallery, which oversaw the class using Perspex as the canvas to create self-portraits.