Camilla Hanney

2019 SECOND-PRIZE WINNER

Age: 27
Location: London
Education: Insitute of Art Design and Technology (IADT), Dun Laoghaire (BA Visual Arts), Goldsmiths University of London (Masters Fine Art)

Biography
Camilla Hanney (Irish b. 1992) is a recent graduate of the MFA programme at Goldsmiths University. In 2015, she graduated from Institute of Art Design and Technology, Dublin with a first class BA honours degree in Visual Arts Practice. Her work was selected for showcasing at the 2014 and 2015 RDS student art awards exhibitions in Dublin. She was the recipient of the Ormond Studios Graduate Award in 2015 which culminated in a solo show. Her exhibition, Resurrecting Monuments to Moral Degradation, marked the end of her 2016/17 residency at A4 Sounds. Since moving to London, her work has been exhibited by a diverse range of galleries including SLG as part of Bloomberg New Contemporaries. She is the 2019/20 recipient of the Sarabande studio award in conjunction with New Contemporaries.

Submitted work

Title: The Fragile Texture of our Desires

Title: Domestic Pleasure

About the work
‘The Fragile Texture of our Desires’ is an ephemeral floor installation that explores both the fragility of the human condition and the complex nature of our desires. The temporality of the work reminds us that we are all transient beings and our bodies, along with the material world that surrounds us, are in a slow process of returning back to the dust from which we came. By materialising the familiar in an unfamiliar context, Camilla stimulates our ability to rethink our relationship towards objects, threatening the natural order and toying with the tensions that lie between beauty and repulsion, curiosity and discomfort, desire and disgust.

‘Domestic Pleasure’ plays with the tropes of the witch. The broomstick presents us with a symbol of the oppressed powerful woman who was demonised because of her sexuality. The long tresses of hair cascading from the broom’s surface are representative of feminine desire, recalling imagery of temptresses with long flowing hair who were exiled on account of their lustful sins. The broomstick was said to have been originally used as a device which 16th-century women would anoint with liquid mandrake, a plant lethal to ingest orally, before inserting into themselves to ‘fly’. The broomstick represents the mundane domestic object that could be repurposed to satisfy women’s desires and perverse pleasures.