Gimpel Fils Gallery

To draw a tree.  To draw a tree is a kind of waiting.  Waiting for the space it occupies to change.  Time passes as you draw.  But too slowly to reveal the minute changes the tree is undergoing.  Most trees in England are timepieces, deciduously telling us the season and signalling the next stage in our quartered year.  There’s comfort in their silent concord with each other and the earth, in the visible cycles we rely on.  It’s this latency of waiting and changing that Hannah Maybank’s work embodies, both narratively and formally.  Her paintings and drawings are representations of trees and the breakdown of that representation into what trees do to sky, to human scale, to our understanding of depth of field and to our awareness of nature’s cyclical returns.

Cherry Smyth, “Hannah Maybank: Gathering Life”, in ArtSway’s New Forest Pavilion: a collateral event of the 53rd international art exhibition- la biennale di Venezia, ArtSway and Text +Work, 2009

Following her acclaimed participation in ArtSway’s New Forest Pavilion at the Venice Biennale last year, this exhibition will chart the development of Hannah Maybank’s shellac ink drawings, depicting coniferous and deciduous trees. Including works made since 2007, the exhibition incorporates two recent large scale works, The Guardians and Double Topper.

Hannah Maybank is currently the recipient of the prestigious Artist Fellowship scheme at the Berwick Gymnasium Gallery in Berwick upon Tweed, Northumberland. As part of the Fellowship, she is living and working in the historic border town over the winter months of 2010, and is producing a new body of work in response to the location. Works created during Maybank’s residency will be exhibited in late 2011.