Hannah Valentine: Closeness Is a Diffuse Border

Hannah Valentine (b. 1989 Tāmaki Makaurau) lives and works across Tāmaki Makaurau and Tauranga. Valentine's practice is pervaded by an interest in the body and its physical and performative sensibilities, emphasising the importance of touch and our experience of interacting with the world and with each other.

Borrowing its title from a stanza in Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s poem Matter, Hannah Valentine’s new exhibition Closeness is a diffuse border delves into the artist's experiences of motherhood to bring together hand-moulded bronze aspects with stoneware and cotton thread carefully braided into delicate ropes in a series of freestanding and wall-based sculptural works.

The exhibition is accompanied by a response from Gabi Lardies, who writes, ⁠
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"Valentine’s work has always called us to embody life, and tethered us to the real and tangible as an antithesis of living in a world where a digital overlay creates new, differing realities. Its surfaces, almost always holding the impressions of her fingers, have called us to the fact that our bodies shape our experience of the world. There’s been invitations to touch, to hold and to play. To engage with Valentine’s practice is to re-tether yourself to the physical, tactile world. Hand moulded works are present here too – sculptures that maintain the energy of how they were made – pulled, pushed,squished, twisted. In connecting this with motherhood, she has registered with great sensitivity the phenomenological experience of it. In tethering motherhood to physical things, Valentine reasserts that we live in messy organic sticky bodies."⁠
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Gabi Lardies first met Hannah Valentine when both were studying at Elam School of Fine Arts. Based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Lardies has written for The Spinoff, Metro, New Zealand Geographic, The Guardian, North & South and others.