“Like rivers, memories flow. They are unsettled and mutable, transient and unstable, always en route to another destination, never fixed nor certain of themselves. Yet memories are inescapably connected to the real; they “take root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images and objects” and materialise themselves in things. Pierre Nora speaks of the importance of places where “memory crystallizes and secretes itself,” which he terms sites of memory. Via memory, the symbolic becomes palpable and geographic, like the banks of a river, strewn with the detritus of a passing flood.”
“Artworks are thus the detritus of the mind, flotsam and jetsam on a stream of consciousness. They are the embodiment of transient memories and mental conceptions, making something real and lasting from the fleeting and endlessly pliable. Through making, memories take root and plant themselves in the real, bursting forth in the riparian zone between the mental and the material.”
Hannah Quinlivan is in a number of collections including the National Gallery of Australia, The Australian High Commission (Singapore), Deakin University Art Collection, KPMG Art Collection, The Australian National University and The Molonglo Group. Hannah graduated from ANU School of Art in 2011 and was the recipient of an impressive number of awards including the Peter and Lena Karmel Award for the highest honours grade. Hannah has been awarded the Cox Prize for Sculpture at Sculpture on the Edge 2013. She is a current recipient of two Australia Council’s grants that have allowed her to undertake a series of mentorships and artist residencies in Berlin.
