HANNAH Walsh

Hannah Walsh is an Aotearoa New Zealand–born artist based in St Ives, working from her studio in Zennor, Cornwall. Her paintings express an animist view of the natural world, drawing on a deeply intuitive relationship with landscape and light.

Working across oil painting, watercolour and mixed media drawing, her practice is strongly process led and driven by automatic mark-making. She employs a range of tools and techniques to amplify the immediacy of her marks, relinquish conscious control and remove the hand.

Across numerous layers, Walsh builds ‘ecosystems’ from a vocabulary of intuitive gestures informed by close observation, foraging, and drawing. Smudges, scratches and dispersed marks give rise to subtle atmospheres and spatial impressions, echoing the rural and coastal environments of her upbringing.

With a background in architecture (BAS, M.Arch.Prof., VUW, 2021), Walsh embraces shifts in scale and perception to push the work toward abstraction. By viewing her mark-making as a scale-less visual language, she weaves otherworldly space where energetic movements are visible and juxtaposed with suggestions of landscape.

Recent exhibitions include Living Light (Wellington 2023), Charged Places at Sailors Jail Gallery, (Falmouth 2025), and the Spring Selective at Circle Contemporary Gallery (Cornwall, 2026). In 2025 she completed a residency at Porthmeor Studios, St Ives. Her work is held in private collections across New Zealand, Europe, Africa and the UK.