Celebrating its 20th anniversary, Robert Morat Galerie is very happy to present the first German solo exhibition for British artist Hannah Hughes.
Hannah Hughes is a visual artist working in photography, collage, and sculpture. Her work involves strategies of fragmentation and reconstruction, focusing on the potential of negative space and the salvaging and re-use of discarded materials, where value is often found on the sidelines.
The exhibition title Solid Slip suggests a congealing of two oppositional states, where ideas of statis and flux co-exist. This proposition is reflected in a series of collages and small-scale ceramic sculptures, which appear to fluctuate between flatness and form, surface and depth. The term Solid Slip refers to tensions inherent in hybridity on both a geological and human scale, from sub-surface slip-shifting of plate tectonics to the micro-tensions apparent in dialogues between everyday materials as they join, fuse, and overlap.
In a series of small collages, lithic shapes suggest sculptural volume within flattened space, with titles such as Lapilli and Upwarp, which refer to natural transformations of liquid and solid matter. The larger collages on view further explore ideas of fusion through cuts created in their surfaces in which photographic fragments are tucked, creating interior niches within the images. The oxymoron of Solid Slip is reinforced through visual contradictions within these works – forms that overlap might also appear to pierce holes, shapes simultaneously stretch and compress, fragments erode and bolster, and shadows are both plausible and contrary.
The fragmented shapes originate from images where negative spaces surrounding figures and objects have been cut out and re-photographed to create an ongoing generative alphabet of forms. In these works, Hughes explores the conditions of presence and absence in sculptural images through reconfiguration, while also testing the structural tensions created by layers and seams, considering the nature of material memory and how materials behave as strata.
Hughes’s ceramic works similarly relate to spaces of absence, often casting forms in porcelain paper clay based on fragments of discarded packaging. A new series of works titled Wrap feature outer stoneware structures recalling the forms of disposable containers, architectural models or miniature stages. Many of these ceramics took their starting points from niches and burial chambers at archaeological sites visited during a recent research visit to Rome, using their discreet forms as reliquaries in which cast porcelain fragments perform unspecified functions. Presented from a frontal viewpoint on wall-mounted plinths, their rear and hollow internal aspects are implied but partially concealed, reflecting the incomplete biographies of their fragmented forms.
