Hannah McDonald thinks of her practice like a ladder: one that started way down below the ground and has been reaching further and further upwards towards sea level and beyond. Like in those dreams when you can’t seem to reach the end of the corridor – only in this dream there is no panic but rather a pleasure in the infiniteness of the journey.
She spent last Autumn in residency in a Swedish forest, drawing from the trees, making prints from the drawings and layering prints together; a mesh of interwoven lines and thoughts and repetitions. Her residency at Trykkeriet was the next rung on the ladder. The works in the exhibition ‘The Better Tree’ have originated from a photograph of a tree taken in the centre of Bergen. This informed what became ‘The Mother Print’ and led off down lines in drawings, drypoints, monoprints and screenprints, a continuing forking of twigs out to the very reaches of its fingertips.
Hannah McDonald is a British artist grounded in drawing and printmaking with a MA in Fine Art from Bergen Academy of Arts, and a BA(Hons) in Painting and Printmaking from Glasgow School of Art. She currently lives in Göteborg where she runs Thingness, a domestic micro-gallery with her partner Martin Holm, and hosts Open Process Night, a platform for testing live works. She is on the boards of Galleri 54, Göteborg and Ljurhalla Fabriken, Vårgårda.
The exhibition is supported by Bergen Kommune, Norske Billedkunstnere and Norske Grafikere.