HANNAH ROSE DUMES - BRAMBLE

Hannah Rose Dumes plays with the core qualities of colour, shape, and texture in her recent paintings, evoking a vibrant frenetic energy. Her work embraces a certain wild, external chaos and experimentation with material that is met by an internal tranquility and focus. By exerting the disorderly and open possibilities of paint, Dumes gives up an element of control and leans into an acceptance of the uncertain. Dumes's work exudes a richness of depth and colour. Many layers are painted upon each other and built up sometimes over many years. Paint is frequently squeezed straight from the tube; there is a sculptural quality and rejoicing in thick impasto.

This intuitive and perceptive approach to shape and composition examines freedom and the unconstrained inclinations before self-consciousness sets in, a space that the poet, Mary Oliver, refers to as the “wild, silky part of ourselves.” In 'Bramble', Dumes frequently returns to the use of organic shapes, such as starbursts, spirals and floral vines. These grow within and around grid-like structures that anchor many of her compositions. The interaction between linear shape and organic marks can be traced to Dumes’s own environment in Detroit, Michigan, an urban landscape where native plants and weeds grow inside and over forgotten buildings and live together with a sense of opposition and harmony.

Each painting in 'Bramble' is an accumulation of seemingly contradictory endeavours: the spontaneous and the thoughtful. Bold and striking marks allude to these contradictions and the unwavering fearlessness to explore them. Dumes understands the powerful psychic suggestions of colour, employing them much like Wassily Kandinsky, who was the pioneer of abstractive psychological connotations. The cornerstone of Dumes’s practice is an exploration of the universal motifs of human experience through mark-making and colour.