ARTIST STATEMENT
i work in a space where i hope to bring together process, care, purpose, and learning, to foster— through the use and play of design, language, and performance— an emotional freedom.
Many of the objects I create during my performative processes focus on my connection to flour, salt, water, and air. When combined, these ingredients create a dough that moves, resists, smells, and ages like my own flesh, and when worked with by hand, can make my palms sweaty. These ingredients, in turn, keep me close to the hearth. They do not only resemble the body, but can nourish the body. This keeps me requiring the resources and context of a sink, a source of heat, and a table to work on. The residual objects of working with these ingredients, elements, and processes are bread and salt dough artworks, offerings, archives, and monuments. Objects to depend on, reflect on, and move on from.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
hannah bevens is an artist, educator, paralegal and former pastry chef. After receiving their undergraduate degree, hannah produced breads, cakes, pastas, and desserts for a variety of restaurants, bakeries, and catering companies in the Hudson Valley of New York for eight years. These experiences greatly impacted their understanding of material and studio practices, inspiring themes of labor, indulgence, craft, and necessity. hannah also conducts their studio practice with a survivor’s perspective and aesthetic, contextualizing much of their work and processes as protest to the systemic patriarchy and rape culture, but more so as a way of healing from the sustained traumas of these constructs to be dismantled.
© hannah bevens