Hannah Murgatroyd: Landscape As A Peopled World

About

Hannah Murgatroyd’s painted and drawn worlds are inhabited by protagonists who spring from a history of the body, as told through high art, popular culture and personal narrative. Often exploring a moment of desire; one that is owned equally by both men and women; she presents a vision of the world that is eroticised, ambiguous, emotional and deeply engaged with surface. Her images of hyper-realised bodies are pneumatic, poised within the natural environment and bathed in colours that seduce the viewer into emotional responses, based on what might be real.

Here, she explores the body set within the landscape, particularly focusing on rural scenes and seasonal, working bodies. Bodies that feel somehow consigned to the past, yet are idealised through our current fetishisation of the artisan, of authenticity, craft and the local.