HANNAH IRELAND

Ireland works on glass. She makes faces that emerge from watercolour washes and impasto smudges and smears. They’re made to be viewed from the reverse — portraits declared in a half-turn. Several of the faces rebel against their supports, some are quiet and content, a few peer longingly out from the closed windows. Some do, in fact, stare from real window frames, taken from their original context and made into art objects

Within her portraits are the exaggerated flourishes of an eyelash, glasses, lipstick, tinted brows, the beads of a necklace, the patterns of a shirt. They are emotive — sad, hurt and confused or confident, aloof, questioning. Ireland’s artworks consider how we construct, revise and reassemble our images to suit different needs, different contexts, different people.

Hannah Ireland is an emerging artist from Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa (NZ) and is of Māori and Pakeha descent. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Psychology) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Auckland. Ireland recently won the Supreme award at the Molly Morpeth Canaday Awards in Whakatane and is a finalist in the inaugural King Tūheitia Portraiture Award at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery.