Hannah Ellul
Lectuer, MA Fine Art (Online)
Hannah Ellul is a Glasgow-based artist and educator, with a particular interest in sound, moving image and publishing. She often works collaboratively, informed by the possibilities art presents to foster contingent and expansive practices of relationality. Her work is deeply engaged with listening and ‘minor modes’ of communication: aural, tactile, and affective ways of understanding.
She holds a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London, and an MFA in Fine Art from Glasgow School of Art. She has taught Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths and Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art and Edinburgh College of Art, at undergraduate and postgraduate level.
Her work explores sonic experience and critical practices of listening. She is interested in sound as a bodily disturbance: listening is not an activity that allows us to put a clear distance between ourselves and others, but inflects our encounters with the places and bodies that surround us in unexpected ways.
She often works with archival materials, and has a longstanding interest in the intersections of historical and political consciousness in art. Her doctoral research considered the appropriation of politically-charged images in contemporary art, and particularly contemporary drawing. In doing so, it opened onto questions around artists’ documentary practices and use of archives, and the political agency available to the work of art. It also drew on ideas around situated and embodied knowledges, informed by feminist, queer and postcolonial approaches to cultural production.
Themes in recent work include language and social discipline, and the material and corporeal qualities of the voice, as it falters; the play of intimacy and distance that characterises acts of transcription and translation; entanglements of language loss, (mis)translation and song within the diasporic family; and efforts to situate the biographical within the social ties that shape it.
Recent projects have developed through publications, performances, exhibitions, commissions and residencies. Organisations she has worked with include the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s Tectonics Festival; Nottingham Contemporary; Transmission Gallery, Glasgow; Titanik Gallery, Turku, Finland; the Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada; Q-O2, Brussels, Belgium; and Nida Art Colony, part of the Vilnius Academy of Art, Lithuania.
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