THE ARMORY SHOW | NEW YORK: Hannah Brown | Hollow Pond

Frestonian Gallery, London, is delighted to be exhibiting Hannah Brown's latest series of work, the Hollow Pond series, in the Presents section (Booth P37) at The Armory Show in New York, 7th-10th Sepember 2023.

This work is a continuation of Brown's interest in our relationship to nature, the psychology of landscape and what it means to use it as a subject in the 21^st Century. 

In these paintings, Brown focuses exclusively on one small area of land in Epping Forest, East London. Hollow Pond, that the work takes its name from, refers to former gravel pits that were dug in the mid-19th century to create the surrounding roads in a rapidly expanding industrial London. In 1905, these pits were expanded into a single lake. This lake, lined by oak trees, has since evolved into a sanctuary for flora, fauna and for those who live nearby, including Brown.   

Brown makes work about places that are familiar to her, and by revisiting these spaces over several seasons or years she discovers views that the casual observer might pass by. These sites gain significance not from their grandiosity but from the newfound attention they receive. Sometimes these sites are under direct threat of development (Pedlarspool series) or forever lost to it (The field next to Tesco that is soon to be built on series). Whereas more traditional landscape painting might seek to elevate a grand view, Brown finds her subject within the latent spaces of manufactured environments, such as roadsides, parks and farmland.

The art historian Susan Owens writes that Brown“…is a painter of the overlooked and the marginal; she honours the trees and hedges, leaves and branches of nowhere in particular with her close attention. But her paintings are about much more than detail. Each reverberates with a sense of enchantment, though whether benign or disturbing is hard to say. What is visible of sky glows with the kind of evocative, evanescent light that comes only at dawn or dusk. Her Hollow Pond paintings brim with elusive meanings and suggest both beginnings and endings, joy and melancholy. Empty of people, they are stage-sets before the play begins – or after it has ended…

So how do we experience the natural world today, no longer in lockdown but against daily reports of ever-higher temperatures, floods and wild fires? In an oblique and lyrical way, Hannah addresses the question by valuing the local landscape, however scrubby and marginal. By connecting with nature, finding in it a source not only of anxiety but also of joy. By falling in love with hedgerows and leafy banks and communicating it through paint. Painting, after all, is but another word for feeling. “ (Owens, 2023)