Hanna Knowles

Process/Progress

My sketchbook provides a space which I can occupy without hesitation. It enables a practice of impulse and honesty. The pages host a vital component of my process, which is the construction of images without any preconceived destination as to what their content or composition will consist of; I dwell on anything that resonates via drawings. As I go through my life I am affected by shapes, movement, shadows, spaces, and how figures are composed of these things. In my sketchbook, this intuitive production of images allows me to reflect on the things I am affected by.

My paintings, as well as the drawings in my sketchbook, address a discomfort with the gender binary, and a looming dysphoria concerned with human life under capitalism. I am interested in exposing and dismantling, and expressing an absurdity which our gender binary reeks of. Through my paintings I contemplate how binary systems of gender march hand in hand with our “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” The violence of our binary system of gender is vast, and the presence of said binary system must be recognized as inextricable with other dehumanizing hierarchies of capitalism such as those concerned with class and race. I am expressing a repulsion with dogmas and standards indoctrinated by the capitalist agenda, and an urgency to detach myself from them.