Artist Statement

Hannah Luxton's paintings are inspired by the late 18th Century Romantic notion that a divine power resides within raw nature. Animistic currents run through the works, hinting towards a higher spiritual dimension. Animism intimates the attribution of a living soul to inanimate objects and natural phenomena, and belief in a supernatural power that organizes and animates the material universe. Luxton finds her subjects in her observations of the remote natural world - the sun, the moon, stars, mountain tops, waterfalls, craters and ice caverns - condensing and abstracting each referent into an archetypal version of itself.

 

With an instinctive empathy for Eastern philosophies of the Void, Luxton embraces this space as freedom beyond the confines of the material world. She uses bare linen to give substance and significance to supreme 'nothingness', dissolving the boundary frequently drawn between 'the natural world' that surrounds us on Earth and the 'natural' sphere of the cosmos.

 

Luxton's studio process is one of contemporary manipulation of traditional, age-old painting methods and materials, in which she has mastered oil paint to appear in a variety of guises. Luxton predominantly employs single pigment oils to demonstrate a colours' character and clarity, and often grinds her own semi precious and rare colours such as Malachite and Lapis Lazuli.

- Hannah Luxton & Sara Jaspan, 2021