Signs for the Living: an exhibition by Hannah Lister

Sun 29 January 2023 - Sun 23 April 2023

Combination Room (above Porters' Lodge)

Hannah Lister’s photographs are complex, subtle, multi-layered works. They invite the viewer to engage with the questions they pose about representational image-making in general and the nature of photography in particular, but they also raise larger symbolic and spiritual concerns, about our position in time, our embodied relationship to landscapes and to the environment, and about our connections with others.

Hannah uses analogue photography and printing to cultivate chance and intuitively sifts its potential. Her emphasis on the materiality of the photograph, which she sometimes enhances by deliberately embracing potential flaws in the process of print-making, is in subtle dialogue with her photographs’ representational functions. We contemplate the quizzical glance or equivocal gesture in a portrait, the evocative landscape with its evidence of presence and distance simultaneously, the mundane object freighted with unexpected and enigmatic symbolism. The photograph is never objectively, transparently recording: it is an image, a selection, an artifice; but it is also weighty and mysterious, pregnant with some undefined meaning, elusive and allusive simultaneously.

The exhibition will be open to the public from Sunday 29 January.
Opening Times: Saturdays and Sundays 10.00-17.00, until Sunday 23 April.

Please note that the exhibition is occasionally unavailable, for instance during graduations.
It is advisable to contact the Porters' Lodge in advance of your visit (01223 335900).

Cost: Free