Hannah O'Hare Bennett

Exhibition Statement

I make work that is in the broadest sense about human relationships to the landscape.  In this current body of multimedia tapestries, “People, Places and Things/Gente, Lugares, y Cosas,” the “landscape” is both a specific community in a particular region of the world and the internal emotional journey of a person who has purposely chosen to be a foreigner.  It is inspired by my experience two decades ago when I lived in an Ecuadorian village for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer.  Everything was disorienting when I first arrived–the mountainous landscape, the language, some aspects of the culture; there was no choice but to adjust, learn the language, and humble myself in the face of many missteps and mistakes.

In these tapestries, recognizable images emerge in some places and are obscured in others, materially expressing the moments of understanding that emerged as I gradually integrated into the community of Quillin, canton of Saraguro, province of Loja, population 60.  By mending together disparate materials into something new and whole, I celebrate my memories of that time and the people who were a part of my life (and remain so now).  One of the ways that my village neighbors and I built relationships was by doing manual work together, like shelling mountains of corn, making empanadas, spinning wool from the sheep.  There is an echo of those repetitive, cumulative activities in many of the processes I use in my art.  Ultimately, this work is about human connection to each other and to the landscape, both of which were an inescapable fact of village life. 

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In June 2024, about 18 months after beginning People, Places and Things, I returned to Ecuador for the first time in twelve years.  I had been somewhat anxious about this trip–it had been so long, my Spanish would certainly be rusty, and the news had been full of warnings about how dangerous Ecuador had become.  As it turned out, my worries seemed silly as soon as I arrived at Ecuadorian customs. My Spanish was mostly still intact, and the agent I spoke to was warm and welcomed me back to the country, as did my taxi driver and the hotel.  Over the next few days, I walked around the cities of Quito and Cuenca, and eventually tiny Quillin.  I realized that, mostly unconsciously, my work has drawn inspiration not only from memories of interpersonal relationships and culture, but from the physical structures and objects that people make for themselves in locations that have been very meaningful to me.  And therefore, the title of this exhibition is In the Vernacular, meaning local, natural, colloquial, domestic, functional, as opposed to formal, monumental, literary.  Maybe that’s a paradox, since this work is most likely to be seen in a gallery, away from the daily lives of most people.  But still, this is the work I am moved to create.

Definitions and Elucidations

  Vernacular is a term most frequently used in reference to either language or architecture, and indeed those two things are very much a part of the inspiration for this work.  But I would add a third category to that: craft.  Here are a few words about each of these three applications of the term, hopefully this will shed light on the ways that I make the work in this exhibition.

Language

Twenty years ago I learned to speak in the vernacular of Southern Andean Ecuador, and any native Spanish speaker with knowledge of that country can immediately recognize that as soon as I start speaking.  To me, that version of Spanish is the natural and ideal version of the language, clear and sweet, with some Kichwa words mixed in, making for an expressive way of speaking particular to the area around the town of Saraguro.  

Architecture

In Ecuador, colonial architecture and perhaps the ghostly remains of pre-columbian structures merge with a melange of the more humble modern building styles, making for a sometimes incongruous effect that I love.  Painted cement next to adobe next to stone, peeling layers of paper signs, painted political slogans or ads for agricultural chemicals.  Roofs made of red tile, grates in different shapes of metal, ceramic tiles, linoleum.  It all comes together in a collage of ordinary life.  

Craft

I own three handwoven wool blankets made in Quillin.  They are made entirely from the wool from flocks of sheep owned by the farmers there.  That wool is hand spun, and then sent to the weavers in the village, who, for forty dollars, will weave a twill blanket that will cover a double bed. Simple, warm, and created entirely within that locale with no thought of selling to outsiders, this is a vernacular craft.  As the economy changes, mostly likely this practice will die out, just as many others already have.  But I think that we can learn something from people that make use of what comes from materials that are close at hand.

Upon further reflection, I think that one of the reasons I am drawn to the vernacular is because of the way that I was raised, on an organic farm in central Kansas, by people who had a similar kind of thrift and ingenuity with materials that my neighbors in Ecuador did.  Maybe, after going to college, and some short stints in cities, settling into life in a remote mountain village reminded me of home in the flatlands.  My dad constructing a greenhouse cover with the collected sheets of plastic he’d salvaged from packaging materials from his job really did have something in common with Doña Mariana repairing a plastic bucket by sewing the crack up the side together with twine.  

This exhibition is made possible with support from a UW-Madison Division of the Arts Edna Wiechers Arts in Wisconsin Award, and a fellowship for the 2024 Winter Residency at Penland School of Craft.  It is dedicated to the memory of Jim Belote, the first Peace Corps Volunteer who served in Saraguro, Ecuador from 1961-1963. 

In Spanish, the word for noun is substantivo, a cognate that implies substance, concreteness, something that can be touched and handled. When I began learning Spanish as a Peace Corps trainee in Ecuador twenty years ago, it was nouns, the words for people, places and things, that I found easiest to grasp. They stayed still, allowing themselves to be examined, rather than shifting around the way Spanish verbs do, changing endings based on who is the subject of the sentence.

Peace Corps service begins with three months of language and technical training, after that, you are assigned to a site somewhere in your country, and that is where you are to live and work for the next two years. The works in this show are inspired by specific people, places and things that I knew intimately during the two years that I lived in my site, Quillin, Loja, as a sustainable agriculture extension volunteer. I arrived with my nouns, an ability to conjugate approximately fifteen verbs, and a lot of trepidation. Everything was strange, and I had to build a worldview from scratch. This was something I had chosen to do, but it was still quite daunting.

I was lucky. As soon as I arrived in Quillin, the people there took me in as their own. They were patient as I blundered through not only the language, but with the new culture, climate and landscape. Gradually, my disorientation dissipated as I adapted and even thrived. This exhibition is both a tribute to the people, places and things in Quillin and the surrounding area, and a visual expression of how it feels to live in a new culture.

The individual works merge materials that I first encountered during my Peace Corps service, such as beads and handweaving, with the handmade paper and embroidery that have anchored my art practice for the last decade. In these hybrid pieces, recognizable images and patterns emerge in some places and are obscured in others, materially expressing the moments of clarity and understanding that develop as an individual adjusts to a confusing new environment. The three piece series Tres Marias is inspired by photos of girls I worked with in the elementary school in town, who had dressed up for the Christmas posada. These three were an angel, the virgin Mary, and one of the three wise men. The pieces also incorporate visual references to the “three sisters” method of growing the corn, squash and beans that everyone in Quillin depended upon for sustenance, as well as the sky, land and waterways of the Andes. The portfolio Quillin pairs small studies with text about life in the village and surrounding area. El Pozo, Piedra de Montana, Hojas, and Murad and the two of the studies refer to places in or near Quillin.

Ultimately, People, Places and Things/Gente, Lugares y Cosas is about human connection to each other and to the material world, something that seems to be diminishing in the age of digital communication and social media. It is also an optimistic exhibition. In a time where division and strife are all we hear about on the national and international news, I am inspired by the knowledge that I was once a foreigner, and a community made me welcome, showing me incredible grace. I have been home for eighteen years and I hope that I have been able to show similar grace to those that arrive here without language or knowledge of American ways, as well as to my fellow Americans.

Funding for this exhibition comes from the Edna Wiechers Arts in Wisconsin Award from the Division of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A fellowship for the 2024 Winter Residency at Penland School of Craft provided the time and space to create the portfolio Quillin. I am very grateful to all of the people, places and things that have supported me and my work over the last year, especially my parents, Harry and Margaret Bennett, themselves returned Peace Corps Volunteers (Belize 2002-2004).

From the moment we are born until we die, we are almost constantly in contact with cloth as we move through our lives. Without thinking about it, we are familiar with its varied qualities--the simplicity of white cotton, the luxury of silk velvet, the flexibility of knitting, the structure of weaving. We can see history in a piece of fabric, how it wrinkles, stains, takes repairs, unravels. Paper is a kind of nonwoven cloth, and is in fact often made of recycled cotton or linen. It can be dyed, stitched, wrinkled, torn, and repaired much in the same way as fabric. This exhibition presents new works of handmade paper used in innovative ways, alongside more traditional textile pieces, all drawing inspiration from the varied landscapes where they were made.

Most of the work here emerges from the nearly two years of pandemic altered life, and comes from three different projects or bodies of work. Wrinkled Landscapes, Some Mended and the six large framed pieces were made during a project called Daily Paper 2022, which lasted from January to May, 2022. Nearly every day during this period, I made one large sheet of paper by pouring pulp onto a large screen and allowing it to dry. As you can see in the works displayed here, I used many different kinds of pulp, pigments and additives, resulting in a wide variety of effects. I am especially interested in the gold pigment in some of the papers in Wrinkled Landscapes because it is extracted from a tree that grew abundantly on the farm where I was raised, and was used as firewood in our furnace. The wood that kept me warm as a child now glows in the paper I make. Many Bridges and several of the pieces in the installation Old Cloth, New Paper are part of my ongoing series of works using a technique I call butterfly wing paper, because it is often so light and thin. A lot of the textures in the work are reminiscent of the trestle bridges and other architectural features in upstate New York, where I began serious investigations into this method of making art. Finally, the six panels of embroidery works, the Playa Summer Lake Series is inspired by the landscape surrounding Playa Summer Lake in Oregon, where I spent ten remarkable days in November 2021. The curving lines come from the long empty highways, the colors from the early winter light on the surfaces of the mountains and dry lake bed, the embroidery patterns from the vegetation and lichen.