Hannah Kershaw (Rollings)
University for the Creative Arts
A Tea Planters Archive
Panel: Biography
‘Place and situatedness’ have become key themes within my paintings, and I look to further uncover this ‘identity’ through looking at an aspect of personal ‘inheritance and legacy’ left by my late grandmother as I live and work on her farm in the Surrey hills where she farmed. My identity is shaped and informed by her legacy, as we both shared a love of the outdoors and a need to connect with nature.
Illustration and in this instance specifically painting is a tool that can be used to bridge the gap between objects, people, and places and their stories. As I weave and connect landscapes together alongside photographic references to form new imagined realities.
Through my painting practice I am using my grandmothers personal archive that documents her time growing up as daughter to a tea planter. And later as a wife of a tea planter raising her own family in Sri Lanka. Distant unknown images for me that I long to connect with through the painting process.
By framing painting as a form of participation I attempt to be involved in the historical narrative, rather than spectating or recording it. I endeavour to bring further interpretations to witness, reflect and tell her story, a personal journey of longing, love and intrigue. Re imagining her black and white photographs through my own colourful re imaginings. By exploring heritage through illustrative practice, we participate in events that are historically and geographically distant. As her granddaughter growing up hearing her stories and seeing these objects and photographs as key milestones in her make up and identity. For me heritage is an ongoing, active process as I have for two years now been painting plein air the landscape that surrounds her farm, three years on from her death and this body of work further challenges my relationship with place. My paintings are a celebration of our shared love of landscape and how our identity is shaped by our surroundings.
As Stuart Hall 1999 discusses the role and importance of individual identity and ‘storying’ in reframing ‘whose Heritage’ and in this instance whose place, one of shared ownership.
‘We should think of The Heritage as a discursive practice. It is one of the ways in which the nation slowly constructs for itself a sort of collective social memory. Just as individuals and families construct their identities in part by ‘storying’ the various random incidents and contingent turning points of their lives into a single, coherent, narrative’ (Hall,1999).
Hannah Kershaw (Rollings) (b.1985, UK), Post Doctorate Teaching Fellow in Illustration UCA Farnham. In 2014 Hannah embarked on a practice based 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, ‘From Screen to Green’.
Through painting plein air, Hannah seeks to connect with her surroundings through an immersive painting experience exploring an emotive response to colour and mark making. Culminating in a practice that sits somewhere between abstraction and representation.