Hannah Wooll - Natural Habitat

About

Wooll's paintings explore the uncanny aspects of desire by exaggerating historical motifs of representation. The images are essentially portraits, although not of real people, their distinctive faces being born from a literal or imaginative cut and paste of features, allowing the desired female form to be manipulated and become freakishly beautiful and awkwardly alluring. Enlarged eyes, wide faces and gangly limbs subvert their surface prettiness their tousled locks become a heavy, tangled, and unruly painted burden. There is something desperate about these creatures that are unaware of their physical distortions. They gaze inwardly in self-absorption, or stare out wantonly, the viewer impassively scrutinised, the subject becoming the audience: a wryly unsettling experience. Wooll's lightness of touch and playful use of female iconography - the idealised nude, large limpid eyes, big hair and animals denoting sexuality - are humorously exposed. She places these figures in beautifully painted landscapes transforming them into isolated feral creatures, artificial, sometimes confrontational and gently melancholic.

For more information please contact:

Elin Clements
elin@the12gallery.com
07868 731127

Rachel Weschke
rachel@the12gallery.com
07976 272704