Hannah Cooper

In our rush to memorialise landscapes in digital form, we tend to miss the experience of a place. We pixelate it, share it, and wait for the ‘likes’ to give us the sense of “I was there” satisfaction. By juxtaposing the slow, laborious process of naturally-dyeing and double weaving silk into a structured grid against a hastily shot photograph, this piece is a woven metaphor for our increasingly detached interactions with nature.

Hannah Cooper uses traditional cloth-making techniques to produce domestic textiles, which she believes are deeply under-valued. Production of “ordinary” domestic textiles influences her artistic work, which plays on the formal language of abstract expressionism and the structural and creative constraints of weaving. Hannah taught herself to weave in 2017 on a rigid heddle loom, concentrating on textural possibilities within plain weaving. Now working on a manual 12-shaft Countermarch floor loom, she utilises more complex structures and naturally-dyes her thread with plants and insects.

This’ll look good on my grid (An hour out of Alice II), 2022
handwoven mulberry silk, naturally dyed with plants and insects
$1,800

Image top: Hannah Cooper, This’ll look good on my grid (An hour out of Alice II), 2022. Photo: Courtesy of the artist