Hannah Gartside

I create sculptures and immersive installations: transforming found fabric, worn clothing and the textile detritus of the past using cutting and sewing processes. The key ‘material’ that I am working with is emotion (for example: longing, desire, curiosity). I am interested in revolutionising our collective, and my personal, familial inheritances. I want my work to be part of cracking us open to experiencing new ways of feeling and understanding the ways that we belong to the world. To this end, I make works that move, or can be touched, and that are created from second-hand, everyday objects and materials with lived memory. I am interested in an animistic approach: I consider us to be one form of sentience alongside of many others of equally importance. 

Art-making is my spiritual practice. The work is my way of honouring, respecting, and caring for the world and its inhabitants. I am driven by discoveries (material, relational, psychological). I use worn clothes and accessories such as gloves, as stand-ins for bodies. They are objects that have travelled through time and absorbed it. I believe that along with absorbing the physicality of our bodies (smells, stains, creases), clothes absorb our emotional experiences: yearnings, pains and delights. They become carriers, and through cutting I can transform and free them. 

Statement, June 2026

Hannah Gartside works across kinetic sculpture, installation and quilt-making. Characteristically sensual and poetic, her works transform and in some cases animate, found fabrics and clothing and ephemera to articulate experiences and sensations of longing, tenderness, care, desire and fury.

Her solo presentation Bunnies in Love, Lust and Longing at Melbourne Art Fair (February, 2025), received the Richard Parker Award. Recent commissions include Forest Summons (for Lilith) at the Ian Potter Centre: National Gallery of Victoria for Melbourne Now, 2023, and Loie, Lilith, Sarah, Pixie and Artemisia for Primavera 2021: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art. 

In 2024, Gartside was a recipient of an Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship, from the Samstag Museum, University of South Australia. She will commence an MFA in Europe in late 2025. Her sculpture #19 (Series: Bunnies in Love, Lust and Longing) was the winner of the Woollahra Small Sculpture Award in 2024.

Gartside has undertaken residencies at Australian Tapestry Workshop, Melbourne (2020) and in California at the Varda Artist Residency (2017). Gartside received a Bachelor of Fine Art (Sculpture) Honours from University of Melbourne, Victorian College of the Arts, in 2019, and a BFA (Fashion Design) Honours from Queensland University of Technology in 2010. Prior to her visual art training, Gartside worked as costume-maker and dresser for five years, mainly on productions for Queensland Ballet. Her work is held in the collections of Wangaratta Art Gallery, Wesfarmers, Ararat Gallery TAMA, Darebin City Council, Wyndham City Council, MECCA and Artbank. She is represented by Tolarno Galleries in Australia. 

Bio, 2025