​Here's the Project Statement. 
These conceptual, sculptural works are found object assemblages used to express ineffable, personal experiences. Sometimes, the experiences mapped through these objects are poignant and moving; sometimes they are awkward and difficult, and or hard to recollect at all.  Fleeting occurances like a wink, the last visit with someone, or an interaction, are broken down into its aspects, and paired to each object. 

In a sense this work is about presence: the presence in objects, and the way presence opens up and closes down in the course of living a life, or the movement through a day. 

I made this series after witnessing humans in that experience of being separated from their things. It's for me both an exploration of the lives of things, their histories as companions in our homes, and their fate in junk shops and land fills. This human inevitability of parting with what we care for and hold closest, as well as my own fascination with all the 'stuff.'  I'm interested in the inside/outside delineation in human experience, what we don't know of another's life, and what's laid open to be seen. Also, what we often can't fully register - those moments - as they happen in our own.  

These works, presented via  garlands, shelves and spindles, generally are under two feet in their largest dimensions. Larger site specific, temporary versions are also in development and I welcome invitations to collaborate with a space and one's 'things.' The work is both the sculptural assemblage and the legend that accompanies it. 

This project first began in 2014, and continues today. ​
​As a side note I've noticed that labels and legends are an integral part of several of my projects. These include the projects Offering Shelf and Fresh Eyes and Attendant. Stand Ins between words and forms also happens in all three books of prayer.

This may sound complicated but it's in fact fairly simple. It's a little like reading the book Goodnight Moon in that it's about pattern recognition and the ridiculousness of a cluster of strange objects.

​

I'm noticing as I make these new pieces that there are certain things that are being illuminated in the poems, and certain things being illuminated in the objects. I'll share some of the themes here. In the poems, what's being described are the things that we tend to miss because they are hard to pin down. Things that are either so mundane that we don't even really register them: Like the times we're alone in between events. It's easy to not even be conscious of that happening at all. Or the times when we have an awkward situation with another person, or an intimate moment that's either welcome one or unwelcome, with a stranger or with someone we love. Also, those moments that are big, poignant and memorable, as well as tender, vulnerable and fleeting, are represented in specific pieces in this series.


The objects also have themes in them as well: they are domestic and often incongruous with one another. They invoke for me a kind of play, a balance, and a kind of jumble. The color palette, texture and overall form of them are composed with a lot of consideration.


I may propose a residency with one of the junk shops because I'm there so often and I'm also kind of curious what exactly I'm doing there. What I find I'm doing is sifting through the evidence of other people's lives and the visible way in which a place like that holds evidence of lives that have either been interrupted by events or where a decision was made to declutter and clear out. Some of the objects that I'm selecting were parts of unfinished craft projects or perhaps were part of a life from another era.


Our lives are so full of things. This is stuff we can't take with us when we die or when we go through transitions that we didn't ask for. These pieces are a way to both honor those objects and the quiet little relationships others have had with them in a home: to translate them with what's going on really behind them and through them. I've heard it said that

Matter is a way of seeing, not something that is seen.

I've also sat with the interesting idea that

Objects are something to think with.

​The first comes from a non dual philosopher Rupert Spira, and the second comes from Seymour Papert, a child psychologist who invented logo programming for children. Both of these individuals share a certain brilliance, and I think this work is an expression of both of these ideas. Seeing this all as metaphor for something else: Isn't that in some ways what life really is? To put it differently, if this is your dream, isn't everything in a dream a metaphor standing in for something else.

If you are local, come to the opening and try your luck at the raffle! We're a small operation, so it'll be good odds in your favor!

And if you want to reserve your calendar - or for any other reason - drop me a line or leave a comment below. 

The gallery will be open by appointment , and for events on October 8 3-6, and for the closing on Oct 22. Masks are strongly encouraged and please do not join us if you are sick.



​

It’s August! I’m on vacation! How are you? No really, how are you?

That’s the kind of question I like to ask myself and those around me this month. Below, I have seven prompts for you, to reflect on your experience in the past year, and looking forward to the next. 

August is an enjoyable and slightly disorienting month for me for the past five years, as I am away for the whole month, just as the dhalias start coming up in my backyard. This year I was in Vermont with a wonderful group of artists on residency for a week, and now I’m in Maine for two weeks seeing family and ocean - my saltwater fix for the year!

Being away from studio and home, and sitting down with family and friends I haven't seen for awhile, brings existential perspective on what’s happened and what’s upcoming - as far as I know - when I return home. In Maine I like to check in with myself and when I can with my birthday mate Riley (24 years my junior, my cousins son). By sheer luck, we happened to meet early morning on our birthday on a beautiful dock this year. Riley was going back to his job in NYC that day, and we got in an impromptu birthday check in. We asked one another ‘What the heck happened this year? What did you like about it?’ And ‘How would you like this coming year to go?’ Another way of asking that last question is: ‘Returning here next year, what would you like to be thankful for, amazed by, thrilled about?’ I ask these kinds of questions the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, and I ask them in August too.

While I know I do not drive the bus of life, I have found that knowing ‘what’ is in my heart is essential to inviting the universe to collaborate with me in the ‘how’ - I actually never know how any of it will come about, or if it will, but at least I can focus on what would be joyful as far as I can imagine.

This month I wax existential, lie about, float in water, and I spend many long hours comparing rest areas along interstate 90.

Here's some of what's on my list: 
I am grateful that this year I got to develop some new projects and to share them in new ways.
I am grateful that so many of you have expressed a desire to make your own End Papers books, or to have me make them for you.
I am grateful to be having a solo exhibition on Sept 17, in a beautiful white space on the outskirts of Ann Arbor, and for all of the work ready to share.
to feel clearer than I’ve been perhaps ever, on how to best value, prioritize and engage in the creative and personal relationships that make life worth living, and art worth making.

What I would love to see happen in the new year - the one that started mid August on my birthday - is
to see the birth of my new book Field Guide to Ambiguity come forth next year
to see the project Stand In take on a larger scale, site specific version of itself
to see the continued creation and sale of new paintings and works on paper
to have a lovely, intimate and successful course for End Papers, in person and online.
a love the calendar print, for those special VIPs that love it, coming out this fall
and to continue the fruitful collaborations, friendships and professional relationships that bubble forth
All while working at a very human, kind pace, with lots of space for staring at trees and wandering down paths in various kinds of weather.
And for the winter to feel cozy but also energizing and interesting.

Now, for your own reflection, if you so choose, before the fall begins in earnest:
here are some similar, modified questions. Feel free to respond in the comments below!

‘What the heck happened for you this year?’
What are you grateful for?
What challenged you?
How did you rise to those challenges?

What would work better in the next twelve months (or any interval of time you’d like to focus on)

What would you love to see continue, to flourish and grow?

‘How would you like this coming year to go?’     Another way of asking that last question is:
‘In a year what would you  like to be thankful for, amazed by, thrilled about?’

If you get stuck in 'How the heck could this actually happen?, stop yourself.
‘How’ is none of your business. That’s *’s job, or,  the universe’s business, not yours.
The ‘What’ in your heart is what these questions are designed for.

If you like these writing prompts, see what it’s like to have me ask you this kind of question in the space of a coaching call, with a focus on whatever is most in focus for you, right now. 

​Hope to see you for the opening in September!!

Here's a bulletin style update on the pink tub! I first wrote about the Pink Tub in studio objects, and since then the pink tub has had a change because well, it began to smell really bad. It might have been when I threw some tea in there and so there was more biological matter than just pigment and water. When things started to smell skunky I put it outside, and put some boards and a big rock on it. Now it's just to the left of my side door of the studio, it doesn't smell anymore as far as I can tell. I put the boards there so that creatures wouldn't get in and drink anything, but left openings for evaporation.


The idea of the pink tub is that it keeps the watershed clean by not pouring anything down the drain and it evaporates over time by being outside. I want to point out that I like that it looks really more like a Japanese thing now. Do you see it? Anyway, that's all. The pouring mechanism isn't in my studio directly so it's a little cumbersome, but it keeps the airwaves clean and the actual skunks in our yard guessing.

Here are some things I love about Michigan in the summer. That you can float down a river in a kayak, innertube, paddleboard, even with a twelve pack of beer, right through the middle of town like its the seventies, and no one bothers you. (This is certainly a two sided coin especially as I'm sober since 2011!). The state grows excellent fruit - all manner of berries, stone fruits and apples. There are several fruit   trees I hadn't encountered: The unusual sour cherry, the serviceberry, chokeberry, mulberry, and blackberries growing everywhere right about this time. 


And the fireflies. The fireflies (also known as glowbugs or lightening bugs) are more of a phenomena here than I remember them being in Massachusetts. Look out over a field or lawn at dusk and you see these tiny, silent, unassuming points of light rising by the hundreds.


Tonight, I walked deliberately to a park near our house with a big field just as night was falling because I could see that fireflies were starting to rise out of the grass on our own lawn. I wanted to really experience this in the otherwise darkening space of evening.


Here's the thing about that: In order to see fireflies, you can't actually focus. You have to look with a wide open view. It's a kind of peripheral seeing. 


What amazes me about fireflies is that they don't just happen for a couple of days, or in rare locations. They are this magic thing, and yet they happen all summer long as far as I know, and they are simply embedded in lawns and grasses. When they do happen, it's like they're normal. It's like: Oh, it's nighttime and the fireflies are out. 


If you think about it, fireflies are magic. You can't see them if you look for them. They are under your feet when you walk. They are silent and individually a small beetle-like bug. You have to rest your eyes to receive their light show. When received, it's hard to deny that certain magic is ordinary. Shooting stars require this peripheral vision too.


Lately I've been thinking about how I work, about how I go about a day. More and more it makes sense to approach my entire life that same way, with a kind of peripheral openness and a receiving of experience, rather than thinking that I'm actually doing the things that are happening. When there's a difficult conversation, when there's a good piece of news, when something like a project or a task completes, there's a tendency to think "I did it" I focused, I made it happen, I did it. To an extent that's true, but on the other hand, there's a way that we simply receive a flow of experience that doesn't cease.


Over the fourth, we see the explosions in the sky, amazing and awe inspiring. Fireworks have their magic, but in a kind of focal stage area in the sky, and unlike the complete brilliant silence of firefly and the shooting star, they are a loud, hard to ignore and being explosives, both a simulation of and a by product of human war. It's really nice to have this softer, natural phenomenal happening all throughout, asking nothing of me.


Where is there magic right under your feet? Is it in what you are tasting, what amazing things your hands can do like grab six awkward things to take upstairs? A bird in flight, singing. A cat purring on your chest. A flower opening along a fence. A child saying your name. Please let's expand the list! Comment below and add your own...

And where would you like to rest and receive versus go out and get? 

Here are some related pages from my last book, the 2021 Edition of Contemporary Prayers to Whatever Works:

 
I am very excited to share with you about a labor of love that's about to come to fruition: A solo exhibition at TrustArt Studios in a lovely space there called Barickuda Gallery. The space is the brainchild of Liz Barrick Fall, and she's done a beautiful job of building it out with lovely studio spaces, a nice functional kitchen,  and a beautiful gallery space right at the heart of it. Liz and I have been collaborating on this effort, and I will be showing my work: three different projects that speak in a lovely way together, opening on September 17 2022. 
​
ALIVE is how I feel when I watch how the three projects speak to one another, and my deep desire is to see what happens when I take them out of my studio and hang them in this lovely space. 

The three projects are Puffies paintings, Stand In conceptual sculpture, and the Peg Drawings. 

​Puffies:
These upholstered paintings began 20 years ago, first shown in a two person show at Judy Goldman Fine Art on Newbury Street in Boston with Petah Coyne. This kind of painting process came alive for me again in about 2015, and the paintings have been morphing and evolving ever since. ​

​Stand In Series: 
This series began as three pieces in 2014, which got a fair amount of air time in several exhibitions in MA, NY and MI. This project has come back alive in the form of TWENTY new small scale sculptures since I moved into my new studio in 2022!

In 2014, I showed A Visit with You and My Father's Last Day first for a solo exhibition at 555 Gallery in South Boston, and then for a group exhibition at the Drawing Center NY (2014), and again for a group  exhibition at the Scarab Club in NY (2018).

The sculptures are both sculptural and conceptual, and like several other projects involve a Legend, found objects - sometimes altered - and either a shelf, a garland presentation, or a wall cluster presentation.  I'm not going to show all of the new pieces, but this work is really exciting for me as a conceptual project, and as a new approach to building sculpture. I'm so jazzed about it that I'm having a panel discussion called STUFF, with the esteemed artists Sarah Rose Sharp (also a writer and curator in Detroit) and fiber artist/ deep thinker/ sculptor Katie Schulman on October 8 at the Gallery. 

Both of these lovely people make physical objects that often have associations with other places, contexts and times - and I want to see what happens when we sit down to talk about Stuff, in our lives, in our work, how it overwhelms and/or inspires us. My project Stand In is the inspiration behind this talk, and the Stuff Swap that follows immediately after!!

​What all three of these kinds of work  have in common is that they were made by me in 2021 and 2022, that they feel very alive to me: about an action, a placement, an arrangement that feels fresh and maybe even sudden. So while I am the intersection of this work, I am so excited to learn from you what it's all about!
​

​2. Also coming up is a somewhat daunting task for me, creating an End Papers course. The first one at least will be in person, and I will also eventually make it available as an online course. The intention of the course is to make an End Papers book or books of your own, from the papers of a loved one who has passed on. Or, if you just want to be a part of the project but don't have those papers, you can make a book out of some paper stack you've been hoarding, and would like to transform, rather than keep holding onto or throw away. To find more about the project, there's a whole page on my website hannahburr.com about it, or to let me know you'd like to be on the list to take the course when it's all ready, let me know here!

​3. And finally, I've been working on my website a whole lot! Specifically, I am making an effort to be a little more organized in sharing sneak peeks of new work and to make it easy for you to buy anything from a small work on paper to a large painting. I want you to know that I can ship the work anywhere in the US for the price of the work as its listed on my website! Yes: Free Shipping! And, if you are local, there is a discount to pick the work up from my studio instead. While I don't have a point of sale shop set up for anything other than my art books YET, everything I have on view on my website under Landscape paintings, Abstract Paintings, Puffies, Stand In and Peg Drawings are all available  - unless it says otherwise. Shipping is insured and professionally handled so everything arrives safely. This also means that I don't ship any glazed artwork, but I can help you make framing choices and can even send the work to be framed for you if you like.

That's all for now. Thank you very much for reading this far!

I have a folder full of tests. I thought you might like to see them. Because I work in mixed media, and generally never like to do things the way I supposed to, I am always trying things out. I keep these tests in case I ever go back to the same process, which I rarely do. I thought they were pretty! To be honest, I can't often decipher my own notes, so they are at this point primarily just interesting objects to share.