Hannah Stageman is an Arts Territory Exchange member, artist and curator who lives in Essex UK. She graduated with a BA (Hons) Fine Art from Colchester School of Art in 2011, and a Masters in Art History and Theory in 2014 from the University of Essex. Stageman draws upon the history of landscape, using drawing to help her explore nature, the natural sciences and attendant social histories. She is interested in the idea of the index, the trace, and her physical interactions with the environment. She records her experience through a ‘drawing’ practice which has evolved to encompass printmaking, photography and installation. Stageman has been paired up twice as part of the aTE Residency by Correspondence, firstly with the Alaska based artist Katie Ione Craney with whom she created a body of work and then with Dutch artist Roelant Meijer. Through these exchanges she has further expanded her interests in botany, geography, cartography landscape, wilderness and walking as research practice.
Photograph from ‘Evening walks’ series - curtesy Hannah Stageman.
Much of Stageman’s recent (pre-lockdown) work has been made in response to her daily commutes, the routines becoming part of a mobile sketchbooking process through which she calls into question the pre-supposed ‘non-relationality’ (Auge 1995) of the transitional spaces inhabited by her and other commuters and the particular forms of looking which emerge from the mise en scène of a moving train window.
Sketch book documentation - image curtesy Hannah Stageman.
The artist says: ‘The retaking of photographs, and the multiple retracings of lines – power cables, floor markings, industrial structures – speak of the repetitive nature of commuting and sometimes the onlydifference is the weather. I haven’t decided what will become of these images, but I keep beingdrawn towards making books (working in a library, somehow it feels apt/inevitable). This work hasbeen put on hold for now as lockdown has meant my studio is closed and my train journeys haveceased. Instead, I have been making work from my “daily exercise” and exploring the local.’Stageman has throughout lockdown produced a series of photographs based on the rigid routine of the daily walk, a practice which she documents on Instagram.
Photograph from ‘Evening walks’ series - curtesy Hannah Stageman.
On her experience of lockdown and daily walks, she says: ‘It has caused me to re-examine my relationship to landscape painting and photography and the location in which I live. Many peopledislike the “boring” landscape of East Anglia, its flatness and seemingly unchanging environment – ittook me a long time to appreciate my home. I have always lived on the edges – I grew up on theedge of a rural village, then a large town. A 10-minute walk from my home can feel like I’m in themiddle of nowhere, but I can still hear the A12.’See more on the artists website.
Refs :
Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity - Marc Auge, Verso (London, New York 1995).