Hannah (b. 1985) completed a First Class BA in Illustration and Animation at Kingston University in 2007. She went on to complete a PGCE in Post-Compulsory Education in 2010, followed by an MA in Illustration and Sequential Design at the University of Brighton in 2013.
In 2025, supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) scholarship, Hannah completed a PhD at Kingston University. Reconnecting Children to Nature through Representations of Trees: Rewilding Looking grew from her observations of her children encountering the landscape through play. What began as research into children’s relationship with nature developed into a deeply personal and embodied approach to painting, reconnecting her own practice with time spent outdoors.
Hannah is a painter whose practice explores our emotional and sensory relationship with the natural world. Working primarily through direct observation and en plein air painting, she considers landscape not simply as something to depict, but as a space through which connection, restoration and attentiveness can be experienced.
Hours spent in the landscape gives me the time and space to appreciate the fullness of a place, informed by the changing weather, light and atmosphere of the moment. Working directly from observation, I allow these shifting conditions to shape both my response and the direction of the painting.
I am increasingly led by colour, building each work through layered applications of acrylic, Flashe, oil and oil stick. Colour becomes the form through which the landscape begins to take shape, rather than simply describing what I see. As the painting develops, colour relationships guide further decisions, allowing the work to move between observation and abstraction.
This process creates space for more expressive and intuitive marks. Oil stick in particular allows me to respond directly and gesturally, bringing energy, immediacy and a sense of the physical experience of being within the landscape. Through this layered approach, I seek to capture not only how a place looks, but how it feels to spend time there.
In 2024, Hannah undertook a residency in Hong Kong, culminating in the exhibition See, Feel, Mark: A Journey of Exploration Painting in Hong Kong. In 2025, she had a solo exhibition in Paris with Chartreuse Liqueur, producing a collection of ten botanical and landscape paintings inspired by the liqueur’s herbal ingredients and their medicinal uses.
In 2026 Hannah’s en plein air work was selected to be exhibited in the group show ‘A Day in May’ with John Martin Gallery in Suffolk celebrating landscape painting in aid of the Wildlife Trust.
Hannah works from her studio in the Surrey Hills and her work is held in private collections across the UK, Europe, Asia, and the US.
