Artist in Focus: Barbara Hanrahan

The Art Gallery of South Australia's collection of over two hundred works includes purchases made by the Gallery from the beginning of Hanrahan’s career as an artist, rare student works gifted generously by Hanrahan during her lifetime, and prints from the large and comprehensive collection donated by her life partner Jo Steele in 1997.

During a career as a printmaker and writer that spanned from the 1960s until her death in 1991, Barbara Hanrahan created a distinct and powerful body of work. Trained as a printmaker in Adelaide and London, she lived between the two cities for much of her adult life.

Both of these places exerted a profound influence on her work: Hanrahan drew on the experiences of her childhood in Adelaide for much of her imagery, while the social upheavals of London in the 1960s and artistic influences of the British Pop artists informed her stylistic development. Using the expressive possibilities of the printmaking medium, she explored with an unflinching directness some of the most complex facets of female experience. Hanrahan’s prints delve into the fraught nature of intimate relationships between women, men and women, and women and their own bodies. Hanrahan treated these themes with a mixture of rawness and humour.

The inspiration for her artistic and writing practice was the same. It was the place of her childhood, her sense of connection to the city of her birth, Adelaide – the streets of her earliest memories in Thebarton and the house and garden in which she lived with her mother and extended family. Hanrahan’s prints and books express the complex currents of love and guilt that characterise many of our earliest memories and the intensity of our familial relationships.

These relationships extended to those that were lost to Hanrahan – ancestors and, most keenly, her father. The compulsion to be true to these memories and to make the absent present is a feature of both her prints and books. Although this impetus is dominant in the work, it is by no means exclusive.

Her interests and stylistic vocabulary were wide and she deployed them lightly.

These two opposing, yet not necessarily contradictory, impulses are evident from the beginning of Hanrahan’s life as an artist. Indeed, she gives succinct visual expression to this ‘divided self’ in one of her first etchings Twin heads, 1960.

The small print depicts a young woman with two heads wearing a decorated bodice that exposes her full breasts. In one hand she holds a bunch of flowers, while with the other she pats a bird nestled atop both heads. A ruffle of feathers grows out of her arms. This whimsical work, drawn with a delicate, tentative line, represents the two selves as co-existing harmoniously.

Barbara Hanrahan was introduced to printmaking in 1960 at the South Australian School of Art as a student of the German-trained artists Udo Sellbach and Karin Schepers. She studied at the newly established department of printmaking for almost three years, during which time she learnt the fundamentals of both intaglio and relief printmaking techniques. Hanrahan’s respect for her teachers – her first meaningful contact with professional artists – played a significant role in her development. Under their direction she explored the expressive possibilities of the printmaking medium, making work in the style of early twentieth-century artists such as Georges Rouault, Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso. These student works reveal Hanrahan’s ability to unlock the particular qualities of each technique and to channel these towards powerfully expressive ends.

In Mourners, 1961/62 Hanrahan exploits the scratchy harshness of drypoint to convey the emotional intensity of the scene. Drawing directly onto the copper plate with a sharp instrument, the printed lines appear like jagged wounds. Hanrahan used drypoint throughout her career to achieve this affect.

Similarly, in the woodcut Figure, 1962 Hanrahan gouges the surface of the wood in the manner of the German Expressionists, revelling in the rawness and directness of the medium. She adapted these effects to linocut in later years, in the 1980s creating works of immense power.

Before her departure for London in 1963, Hanrahan made a series of linocuts incorporating image and text. These were inspired by the visionary eighteenth-century British artist and writer, William Blake.

They are striking original prints which convey the vitality of the natural world. In Ah, Sunflower…, 1962 the leaves and roots of the sunflower extend as though in an embrace, while the hatching creates a web of lines that expresses the dense hum of a garden – of flowers, insects and other living things.

Printmaking was experiencing a resurgence amongst young artists in London when Hanrahan arrived in 1963. Artists such as Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton and David Hockney were incorporating images that referenced American and British consumer culture into their prints. Hanrahan, who was studying printmaking at the Central School of Art, responded to these interests.

She concentrated on depicting the often-naked female body, exploring its sexual objectification by the implied predatory male gaze of advertising.

This subject became an important preoccupation during her career, her caustic humour producing surprisingly disturbing results.

Her confronting depiction of the naked male and female bodies in prints such as America the Good and Adam, both 1964 led to difficulties in exhibiting them upon her return to Adelaide in the same year. The Biblical Adam is depicted, each strand of pubic hair carefully drawn, jubilantly dancing in the Garden of Eden. His name is scratched onto his body in graffiti-like text. These prints still have a power to shock, perhaps because Hanrahan conveys the physical and psychological vulnerability of expressing sexual desire.

In contrast to her representation of the jarring, often cruel relationships between men and women, Hanrahan’s images of figures in gardens convey a more harmonious demeanour. In Hanrahan’s art, the garden represents a refuge, replete with regenerative sensual and spiritual potential. In her first, largely autobiographical novel, The Scent of Eucalyptus, the narrator identifies the garden as a place where she can be her true self:

As a student, inspired by the etchings and fine wood engravings of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists, William Blake and Thomas Bewick, Hanrahan developed a distinct pictorial language for depicting her subject’s connection with the natural world.

Hanrahan adapted and expanded this style in the 1970s, creating heavily layered surfaces that team with abstract patterns, flowers and leaves.

Barbara Hanrahan pursued themes of life and death in her printmaking. Her interest in the link between the generations in her own family led her to incorporate photographic images of her immediate and extended family into her prints.

This formed the core of a series of screenprints in the 1970s, including Mother 1933, 1976. Another important and more disturbing thematic strand in Hanrahan’s art is a woman’s capacity to carry a child.

Throughout her career she explored this subject with a searching honesty, acknowledging through prints both the life-affirming and darker sides of mothering. Following her diagnosis with cancer in 1984, Hanrahan’s printmaking intensified and she embarked on a series of final, remarkable linocuts.

Birth was one of the many diverse themes she examined. Adopting a bold, expressive technique – reminiscent of the raw power of German Expressionist woodcuts – she distilled her repertoire of marks to convey the strength required to bring new life into the world. The woman’s eyes are wide disks. Through gritted teeth and with blazing cheeks she forces a baby into the world. This is a work of unparalleled intensity: cathartic, ugly, and beautiful. Facing her own mortality, Hanrahan produced works that resonate with the clarity of truth and the vitality of life.

Maria Zagala, Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs

Notes

1 Elaine Lindsay notes in her introduction to The Diaries of Barbara Hanrahan (University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1998, p. xxi) that Hanrahan had a ‘… sense of being two people, one attracted to the outer world of commercial success and critical recognition, and the other desperate to live apart from the world and to create work which [Hanrahan] feels is true to herself and her God-given talents.’
2 A. Carroll in Barbara Hanrahan: Printmaker, Wakefield Press, Netley, 1986, p. 7 identifies two major phases of activity: 1963–67, and 1975–86.
3 B. Hanrahan, The Scent of Eucalyptus, University of Queensland Press, 1973 reprint 1998, p. 64.
4 This element of Hanrahan’s has received little attention. Alison Carroll, in her study of Hanrahan’s printmaking, considers it separate rather than integral to Hanrahan’s art. She does note, however that Hanrahan ‘…never gave up the decorative strand in her art’. A. Carroll, ibid., p. 18.