How much can one person hold?  How many memories, experiences, traumas, joys, sensations can we carry before we have to make room for the new experiences we face each day?  How does our ability and choice to hold onto certain things limit what newness we may be passing by?  How much human experience can we fit into one lifetime, or possibly carry into the next?  How can we experience joy in the present moment while living in past memories and experiences?

Hannah Hirsch’s work focuses on the totality of experience, thought, and feeling that humans undergo, process, and store as they move through life.  Having grown up in central and coastal Maine, Hannah’s work is influenced by the natural forms of her environment, as well as the comic strips and cartoons that filled her childhood while growing up in the early nineties.  She draws upon these graphic references and natural shapes to produce bold, colorful work with strong lines and a powerful sense of character.  Hannah’s creative process is also highly influenced by her lifelong journey with obsessive compulsive disorder, and how that has distorted her relationship with her own feelings and memories.

Hannah’s process begins with painting on wood, a surface she loves for its strength and ability to withstand her intense, confident mark making.  After painting, Hannah painstakingly cuts out each shape with a coping saw, entirely by hand.  Making paintings that exist outside the confines of straight edges invited viewers to share space with bright figures that evoke memory, personality, and movement.  The reductive process of painting and then cutting away what is not used is directly reflective of Hannah’s own exploration of memory, mental health, and the exploration of what experiences, memories, habits, and relationships people either choose to, or involuntarily carry through life.