Hannah Gartside
She uses deadstock fabrics, clothes found in skips and op shops or given to her by friends, garments of dead relatives and fur from pets. For the artist, clothes are psychic objects that not only have history (a faded menstrual stain, the scent of a beloved) but presence; material has its own life… In this sense, the sculptures are about fabric itself, the singular way in which material is able to articulate the immaterial – a current of air, an undertow of desire. Fabric also has its own sound world and Gartside is listening to what it is saying, ‘pulsing, sighing, calling to us’.
Hannah Fink, Primavera 2021: Young Australian Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art catalogue essay
Read: Hannah Gartside, This Body Is Experiencing Pleasure Catalogue essay – Tiarney Miekus 2023
Read: Short story Frances, the moth – Hannah Gartside 2023
Exhibitions
Hannah Gartside
Melbourne Art Fair 2025: Bunnies in Love, Lust and Longing
In this nest of bunnies fashioned from gloves, it’s as if Hannah Gartside has bundled the world’s most tender feelings and given them aesthetic form through droopy ears, leather pot bellies, sweetly curved behinds, comically suggestive poses. Through Bunnies in Love, Lust and Longing, Gartside has taken second-hand leather gloves from the 1950s and 60s, some […]
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Hannah Gartside
This body is experiencing pleasure
Following on from her major installation Forest summons (for Lilith), included in Melbourne Now 2023 at NGV Australia, Hannah Gartside has created 11 wall-based, works for her debut solo exhibition at Tolarno Galleries, using secondhand sequinned dresses, skirts and tops collected by her over a number of years. Meticulously constructed from the material relics of all yesterday’s parties, […]
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Hannah Gartside
Gorgeous
I am fascinated with the potential connection between a viewer and an artwork. What could we ask of viewers beyond their attention, and as artists, what can we offer? What is possible when both artwork and viewer have skin in the game? In this group of works (which I think of collectively under the name Gorgeous), […]
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