Hannah Rollings, Dahlias at Dawn, 2025, oil, cartridge paper, 30x29.5cm

In 2014, Hannah embarked on a practice-led AHRC-funded PhD through Kingston University and the London Doctoral Design Centre, looking at picturing trees where her love of nature and the pull of the outdoors gained further importance in her practice—working collaboratively with the Forestry Commission and school children developing site-specific interactive work that sought to encourage a reconnection with nature. Shaping and developing an expanded artistic practice previously fractured and stifled by publishing and commercial avenues into an immersive on-site practice. 

Encompassing both studio and plein-air painting, Hannah seeks to connect with her surroundings through an immersive painting experience, exploring an emotive response to colour and mark-making, most recently as an artist-in-residence with SeeFood Room Gallery in Hong Kong with a resulting solo show in 2024 and culminating in a practice that sits somewhere between abstraction and representation. 

Spring 2025 will see the culmination of a commissioned exhibition. Through a series of botanical paintings with Chartreuse, Paris gives a window into the herbal and natural medicinal benefits their monastery and monks use in their ancient recipes. Further, it builds upon and pictures a relationship with nature beyond literal representation and identification to a deeply felt embodiment. 

“My practice focuses on picturing landscapes to imbue and reconsider our connection with nature. Reflecting and considering where I, as an artist, position myself and further notions of the figure in the landscape to address and reconsider broader issues within a changing world that would benefit from a rewilding to reverse some negative impacts. 

This latest series of works on paper with Small Works looks to reframe a personal archive relating to my grandmother's family history as a tea planter in Sri Lanka. By framing painting as a form of participation, I attempt to be involved in the historical narrative rather than spectating or recording it. This series has seen me explore, through large-scale works on canvas and exhibited as part of a group show at the James Hockey Gallery, Farnham, the struggles this land has had to bear. 

The richness of the natural landscape is etched away by the figures presented and the Camellia Sinensis monoculture plantation. Complexities within these relationships are drawn upon to unpack and reexamine these black-and-white photographs and tender relationships for a hopeful future.”