Bakery
Volume 1
SPECIAL ISSUE
March 10, 2025
2025
Emily Sussman
Interviews
Hannah Tilson
Pigment in binder on paper
108.6 x 75.6 cm
(Donated to Whitechapel Gallery’s Art Icon Auction. All proceeds support their Education and Public Programmes)
Courtesy of the artist and Cedric Bardawill Gallery
Emily Sussman: Hi! How are you? Is this the new flat?
Hannah Tilson: It is the new flat! And I’ve just had the genius realization that I can air fry the cookies I’ve made.
ES: That’s exciting!
HT: Yeah, I just haven’t been able to cook for the last year because I’ve been with my parents and their kitchen is [quite small] like one person can cook so I’m enjoying that.
ES: We’re going to try to throw a cookie swap party in a couple of weeks-
HT: That sounds fun. What exactly is a cookie swap party, what it sounds like?
ES: I’m hoping people will actually bring things but basically yeah people make cookies and then I’m going to get boxes so people can make little Christmas cookie boxes and bring them home.
HT: That’s so nice. Oh I love that. That’s a great idea.
ES: It should be cute and fun. Would you like to get on with it?
HT: Absolutely.
ES: Your process starts with a video. Do you see a link between performance and your painted work? How do the videos (if at all) impact your work beyond source material?
HT: So, I’m a musician as well. I’ve played trombone since I was and have sung so I think the idea of performing definitely comes naturally to me. The videos are [the] kind of things that I never really want to show. Not at this moment in time anyway- It’s funny because making work of yourself, painting yourself is very personal, but the videos are another level. If they were to be shown it feels like the magic would be gone. Sometimes you might not see that there’s a face in the painting, you might not immediately have the representation of a figure there but then it might be like, okay then, that’s that.
ES: Maybe there’s more liberty in the anonymity of the who figure is in the paintings, unless the viewer knows it’s you- in the videos it’s clear that it’s you.
HT: That’s one of the reasons why I paint myself-and that’s one of the conversations I have with a friend of mine who has a studio across the hall in my new studio, this idea of painting a face and as soon as you’re painting someone else they look at it and think, “Oh okay, well that’s not what I look like”, or, “You made this [points to chin, eyes, nose] look big, you made this look small,” and there’s an immediate difference there. Whereas it’s the same with the film- I paint myself so I don’t worry about having to ever get a likeness of someone. It’s an avatar, a vehicle for painting rather than it being me. It also helps me feel close to it [the act of painting] convenience means I can always kind of make a new film; a new body of work. Thinking about the music side of it, artist who have painted stage sets, opera sets. I like that history, behind world, because obviously painters build their own world but I like the physicality of actually literally building a world and painting from it and then kind of referencing that.
ES: Yeah. All of that makes sense to me, especially because the work as it is now is very tableaux in the way you’ve set it up and how the fabric and the patterns really encapsulate and contain the space- there’s something to that design language that I think really connects the two, set and painting, performance.
HT: Thank you. Did you see the piece I did on the Plop residency?
ES: Yes!
HT: So, I think for me that was- and now I’m going to skip to your last question [ed. Note- the last question was, where do you want to go with your practice?] thinking about where I wanted to go with work, that Plop piece and thinking about the act of installation work, making a sculptural 3-D work out of something that was initially sculptural and 3-D and then became a drawing, and then [the drawing] became a painting is so interesting. I like that idea of the constant cycle. People normally make a drawing before a painting but I’ve been drawing from paintings and I quite like the idea of something starting as a sculptural set turned into a painted world and then that turning into a painted set version.
ES: It’s interesting to see one idea morph across mediums. It’s similar to the concept of difference.
HT: Exactly like that and then the painted suits come into everything. Everything is that. It’s like Sonia Delaunay making paintings and making clothes and making drawings- everything is all encompassed with the world you’re creating.
ES: Talk me through how pigment, and more importantly making your own paints, impacts how you view your work.
H: It was a technique I learned when I was studying at The [Royal] Drawing School. I’d been working in watercolor before and immediately just fell in love with this way of making. It felt kind of raw, because obviously literally it’s a raw material, but also the whole process of occasionally having to grind up pigments, being very hands-on worked well for my brain. I felt very close to it, it felt immediate, I could be in control of it I could kind of make it as watered down as I wanted while also having really opaque areas as well. It’s a versatile material. It felt like one of those moments where I thought, “Oh! okay! This is the material”, I don’t know- it’s kind of a once-in-a-lifetime feeling of, “I can do what I want to do with this”. So, that felt really exciting and it just was right.
ES: To me it really links together this new work to work from the [distant] past, because I don’t know how many contemporary artists are making and using pigments to inform their paint process at this point. I’m sure there are some—
HT: No, for sure and that’s what’s fun about it, thinking you’re going to the store to get something that would have been on someone’s shopping list like, 300 years ago. That’s really fun. It changes with the world, there’s a green I used for that drawing school show and I have like [pinches fingers together] this much of it left but you can’t find it anymore because the acid in the ground has changed so now it’s a bit more yellow so it’s stuff like that.
ES: When you’re making these pigments and you find that you lose a color how does that impact how you think about making the work. Do you find yourself wanting to replace it or replicate it- do you write these things down—
HT: Yeah, I have a crazy book, like a mad book of colors for every painting I have I have a little book that I write the colors down in inspired by my friend who does similar things in pottery- he has a glaze book. I saw it and I was like, “Why don’t painters have this?”. Paint changes. So now I write everything down but in the classic way as soon as you start to really get into something that’s the one where you don’t write all the colors down and then you’re there lamenting “the one, the one!”-
ES: The one that got away! Improvisation clearly plays a major role in your work, as seen through your experimentation with pigment. Because you play with a variety of mediums, how does that experimentation effect the outcomes you like best?
HT: Rachel Jones did a great talk with I think it was Eileen Cooper (RA) and they were both saying that there’s a moment when painting you’ve messed it up, you’ve added something that doesn’t work but then you’re free and it becomes exciting. It’s like you’ve by accident done something that’s thrown you off the path you were originally on and then that moment means you’re able to do anything. That’s the exciting thing with pigment as well; I learn from them but I also feel like a mad scientist which adds a bit of fun to the day.
Pigment in binder and Lino on translucent fabric
70 x 55 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Cedric Bardawill Gallery
ES: More to that improvisational point do you find that there are outcomes that you’re happier with than others or do you like all of the outcomes in their own way?
HT: I think definitely all in their own way, and as you’ve seen, I have to be working on more than one thing at once I can’t do one piece- my friends do that- one piece, they take it off the wall it’s done. I can’t do that. I’ll make a drawing it’s a drawing, I’ve got a show coming up like, ok that’s a good moment to leave these and sit for a moment and maybe paint a suit; they need to all coexist as a happy family for me to thrive, if that makes sense.
ES: I kind of love that because it really allows you to focus your attention on so many things and really see the outcomes of everything individually at the same time.
HT: For sure otherwise I think I would just feel- every process works differently for everybody of course, but I think I would just feel overworked and because there are so many layers in each piece, and they’re not that forgiving (you can wipe it away but you’re wiping “it” [all of the work] away). It’s not like, “oh no, there’s a bit of orange on the surface, I’ll wipe that orange- like, okay I’m on the wooden board now.” The layers mean I have to not overwork.
ES: For those who may not know your work very well- do you find that there’s a difference or key difference between the work on paper and your work on velum, plaster etc.?
HT: For me no, I think I’m always trying to use the same language and work out the same ideas on each material. Obviously with the see-through muslin-y pieces they have physical layers to them so there’s this three-dimensionality and so the idea a of kind of seeing and revealing is more apparent because you literally are. Certain bits are just being hidden whereas on paper I’m having to create that veil myself. There are ways for me to explore this world.
ES: Perfect feeder into my next question which is about transparency and opacity; they’re really crucial to your work, visually, but is there something to the figure revealing itself or hiding that is also pertinent to the core of your work?
HT: Yeah I think so. The stuff I was making previously at Slade on my BA- the cut-out doll figures, were my way into figurative painting. I was always afraid of painting figures – I don’t know why, maybe because Slade was very figurative and was like, “I want to do this but it has to feel like me “ so I was painting these ghosts- of – figures with no bodies. Then it was going to The Drawing School and having to do life drawing the whole time that made me, as well as Covid, since I was doing a lot of self-portraits during Covid, that was the line that led me to painting myself. For me there’s always that kind of liking of the history of the Ghost paintings and the fact that having a veil in front of the face can kind of make the viewer question what’s there, if they’re looking into something or if they’re encroaching on something. Vermeer’s curtains at the front of paintings invites in the vulnerable- it’s where the vulnerable side of the videos come into play. It’s that idea of, “well this isn’t being seen but it comes from what is”. The curtain kind of helps with that staged dreamlike world.
ES: Fashion and pattern is also critical to your work- I’m still not over your use of that “wicked green” Ganni ensemble, for example. When building out your compositions, what kinds of fashion are you drawn to for inspiration?
HT: What’s fun about that piece is that it wasn’t really Ganni it was a dress I bought online I think cause it was Covid, and everything had to be delivered to you. That feeds into the idea of the Slade suits I painted into the LV ones which played into this tongue-in-cheek idea of not affording the real LV ones so just painting it yourself, as the artist’s outfit. It’s always come intuitively. I’ve always loved clothes. My granny- my mum’s mum who comes from a farming family in Aberdeenshire she taught me how to sew when I was up there for Christmas. She made all her own clothes- not in in a fashion guru way but in a practical way. That’s what you do! It’s always been a love of mine that’s been there.
ES: I’ve noticed some of the pieces you gravitate towards are vintage which gives the work itself a timeless quality as well.
HT: Thank you, yeah, that feels important. I like the idea of- some of the Covid works had facemasks and so that was the marker of its time but I like that they’re not pinned down. It’s not like “Hannah this year was wearing flame suits” because I was but that doesn’t have to be in the history books.
ES: You also have painted on clothes as part of this circular process. Are the patterns you make meant to feed back into your practice writ large, or do you find them to be separate pieces?
HT: All the pieces inform each other in a backwards way. I taught this summer course in Saltzburg at the Summer Academy, it’s a printmaking course and after teaching that course I was like, “why don’t I do this more?” It was that kind of a reminder that it was something I was teaching and I should really do it more in my own work. After that then the lino sort of came into my paintings, before it had been a project I had done for a friend who runs a gallery/dinner/supper club called the Amber room, and they have artists who make the cutlery and the plates, and she asked me to make some napkins. Everything kind of happens in an upside-down way. I’m doing a project which should come out soon, with Drakes, just one shirt with one of my patterns. It’s a nice crossover collaboration with them.
ES: Which painters of the past do you feel have best served you as inspirational, why?
HT: We’ve vaguely touched on Sonia Delaunay, it feels like the all-encompassed world of an artist with her work; clothes, textiles, paintings, everything is kind of – her world is camouflaged with her. Her brain and world are very much her brain and her life. It’s like when you see an artist’s house and you know everything is their language. Dominico Gnoli – classic, I missed his show in I think it was Rome a few years ago which was really really sad, but anytime I see one of his paintings I’m always blown away. Peggy Guggenheim’s gold bedframe, have you seen that?
ES: Yeah I have it’s so so good.
HT: It’s like this cyclical all-encompassing thing, that’s just the dream.
ES: How do you feel your relationships with other artists have impacted your practice?
HT: I’m super super lucky that I’m apart of this energizing and kind and supportive group of artists. London feels like a very safe space- supportive- it makes a huge difference. Like I said earlier about my friend painting a face and not wanting a specific likeness, you have to be able to have those conversations or you feel very alone because otherwise you’re in your studio by yourself.
ES: What are the best studio snacks and tea?
HT: Hmmm so I love food. I started this conversation by telling you I was air-frying a cookie *laughs* I came to the sad realization, because I got this air fryer actually for my studio because like I said I wasn’t able to be making stuff at home, that you can’t really have a big lunch if you’re a painter. So now I’m really sad because I want every meal of the day to be as solid as possible but you get tired so I think best studio snacks, maybe just crisps, like whatsit crisps. Normal [black] tea, I try not to drink too much coffee, because it makes me feel insane sadly though I love it. Then maybe grapes. What about you, what are your snacks?
ES: Oh my snacks, I try not to snack but we just got a bunch of crisps and those little cheese puffs–pirate’s booty.
HT: Oh yum yum. To be fair, Trader Joe’s peanut butter pretzels, [gestures] that wardrobe is full of them.
ES: Yeah America does provide some good things, once in a while.
Pigment in binder and Lino on wooden panel
61 x 52 cm
(Donated to the Christie's Auction in benefit of the Great Ormond Street Hospital)
Courtesy of the artist