Camille Hannah

Subtle Bodies

12 Aug 2026 – 29 Aug 2026

At the end of his lovely book How to Look at a Painting (2008), writer and curator Justin Paton offers a list of ten suggestions for keeping the inward experience of looking going long after leaving the gallery, and it strikes me that number 10 is especially apt when looking at the majestic work of Camille Hannah. ‘Trust the painting’, says Paton, ‘The best advice about how to look at a particular painting is usually right there in the painting’.

Indeed, Camille Hannah’s works determine how we look at them by making optimal viewing of them impossible unless we move. From the outset, these works are meant to be experienced through a kind of private, personal dance (albeit undertaken in public) that connects the act of looking with movement of the body. By engaging with Hannah’s paintings physically – by moving in and out or from side to side – these works “open up” to us, revealing their luminous opalescence and the almost magical depths of their carefully constructed surfaces. While the gestural brushstrokes that comprise the artist’s paintings speak directly to the performative abandon of Abstract Expressionism, they are in fact “built” with layers of glazes applied to the reverse of each work’s mirrored surface; a contemporary form of reverse glass painting which requires the artist is effectively to think, and create, in reverse.

Like the screens through which we increasingly observe and navigate our lives, we are reflected back in Hannah’s paintings but also absorbed into them; interrupting and becoming part of their luscious, yet disarmingly flat surfaces. In ensuring that we cross this field, Hannah encourages us to feel the expansive possibilities of their
sensuous spaces. Through this emotional and bodily experience of the works’ seductive combinations of colour and mark-making, Hannah hopes that we become more attuned to the generative possibilities held within new ways of experiencing and perceiving our world.

– essay written by Kelly Gellatly