About
Hannah Gartside works across kinetic sculpture, installation and quilt-making. Characteristically sensual and poetic, her works transform and in some cases animate, found fabrics and clothing and ephemera to articulate experiences and sensations of longing, tenderness, care, desire and fury.
Recent commissions include Forest Summons (for Lilith) at the Ian Potter Centre: National Gallery of Victoria for Melbourne Now, 2023, and Loie, Lilith, Sarah, Pixie and Artemisia for Primavera 2021: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Gartside has undertaken residencies at Australian Tapestry Workshop, Melbourne (2020) and in California at the Varda Artist Residency (2017). Gartside received a Bachelor of Fine Art (Sculpture) Honours from University of Melbourne, Victorian College of the Arts, in 2019, and a BFA (Fashion Design) Honours from Queensland University of Technology in 2010. Prior to her visual art training, Gartside worked as costume-maker and dresser for five years, mainly on productions for Queensland Ballet. Her work is held in the collections of Wangaratta Art Gallery, Wesfarmers, Ararat Gallery TAMA and Artbank. She is represented by Tolarno Galleries.
2024
Video still of 45 minute live-stream performance lecture Knowing Fabric, commissioned by the Institute of Modern Art for Making Art Work, 2020
Hannah Gartside uses fabric as a vehicle to transport us to another place and time. Closely engaging with the smell, texture, sound and movement of a particular material, Gartside imagines those who have come into contact with it, the places it has been, its function, and how it has been cared for.
Often working with vintage clothing, deadstock fabrics and found materials, through sculpture and installation the Melbourne artist brings memory and history into the physical realm, reinventing fabric by giving it a new life far beyond its original purpose.
– Briony Downes, Art Guide, November 2021
Ilona Nelson, 2021, Brunswick, Victoria