Aleph Contemporary for AccessArt

This is an early piece in Hannah Luxton’s ‘Starstream’ series.This is one of only two in the series that is made in pastel, and it directly informed her popular Starstream oil painting on linen (2019). ‘Starstream’ is inspired by visions of Icelandic waterfalls, combined with the geological phenomenon of stellar streams - a term for a group of stars that move together in a line by the gravitational pull of a galaxy. Merging the cosmological sublime of deep space and the geological sublime on Earth, Luxton depicts stars suspended in the white powdery spray of a waterfall, delicately containing all the colours of the rainbow at once.

Hannah Luxton makes paintings inspired by the geological sublime and the late 18th Century Romantic notion that a divine order resides within raw nature.The works reach further back in time finding an emotional kinship with the implicit sense of the sublime traceable within prehistoric art.Animistic currents run through the works, hinting towards a higher spiritual dimension. Animism intimates the attribution of a living soul to inanimate objects and natural phenomena, and belief in a supernatural power that organizes and animates the material universe.As such, Luxton finds her subjects in her explorations of the remote natural world - the sun, the moon, stars, mountain tops, waterfalls, craters and ice caverns - condensing and abstracting each referent into an archetypal version of itself. Often combining the ephemeral qualities of the natural world with the authority of geometry and symmetry, her paintings slow time and elude direct interpretation. Their strong emotive core is yet fragile and fleeting and they speak an elementary, instinctual language rooted in a place of pre-rational understanding.

Hannah Luxton (b. 1986, London, UK) works from her secluded studio within Epping Forest, on the border of London and Essex, UK. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (2012) and Kingston University (2009). Luxton has completed many residencies and expeditions to locations such as Louisiana,Texas, New Mexico,Arizona, California, Iceland and Mt Etna, Sicily. UK solo and group exhibitions include The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (2021); Glass Cloud Gallery (solo, 2020); Dentons Art Prize (2019); Lumen (2019);ArthouSE1 (2019); Drawing Room Gallery (2018); Blank 100 (solo, 2018); Lily Brooke Gallery (2016);The Barbican Arts Group Trust (solo, 2016). She has exhibited internationally at Midnight Gallery, LA USA (2018); Corridor Projects, Ohio, USA (2016); Boecker Contemporary, Heidelberg Germany (2016); Galleria M, Kolkata, India (2015) and the Fljotstunga Travel Farm, Iceland (2015). Luxton’s work has received support and recognition from Camden Council (2019),The Arts Council England (2018), Betty Malcolm Scholarship, UCL (2012),The Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers and the Lynn Foundation (2011).