Hanna Pettyjohn
The Elaborate Nest Between Child and Breast
4 to 31 May 2006
Mag:net Gallery ABS

Personal narratives are elaborated in the dialectic processes of destruction and creation, as young artist Hannah Pettyjohn presents her first one-woman exhibition entitled “The Elaborate Nest Between Child and Breast” at the Mag:net Gallery ABS starting May 4.

“The Elaborate Nest Between Child and Breast” presents a composite installation of found objects and forms produced by Pettyjohn, denoting various nuances of meaning.

The central element of the entire installation, a bed, serves as the plane of happenings, a stage or platform where the artist’s personal metaphors are unfurled. Pettyjohn carefully puts together an entire sheet or quilt, the individual pieces of which produced from what the artist terms as "artifacts" belonging to her late grandmother (from letters she wrote, for instance).  “The quilt is made of items that belonged to her (her dresses, etc) or paintings I made of her belongings (her books, a poem she was particularly fond of, etc),” the artist says.

Composed around the central elements of the installation are sculptured egg and heart forms filled with wax and broken to produce new objects, alluding to a cyclical process of creating and recreating, of the new being cast from what is past.

In “The Elaborate Nest Between Child and Breast”, Pettyjohn creates and destroys forms, using the shards borne out of this process as a starting point to create new forms. The transition of materials and images—from clay to wax, from eggs, hearts, and heads to shards—comes subtly as a natural and intertwined consequence of this process. These, she says, are also “an allusion to the thought that my image of [my grandmother] is derived from these objects/ artefacts either gathered/altered/ or recreated”.

This elaborate process of constructing, destructing, and again reconstructing objects from salvaged images is one that Pettyjohn started exploring as an undergraduate student at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts. She continues this process in this first major exhibition, demonstrating how these may be utilized to construct metaphors for memory.

“The Elaborate Nest Between Child and Breast” opens at Mag:net Gallery ABS on May 4, 2006 and runs until mAy 31. For inquiries please contact 4100995 (Shey) or email magnetplus@gmail.com