Hanna de Haan

The city is central to my work; drawings I make of buildings and structures there form the basis for my graphic work. I am fascinated by the speed at which cities change, and by the fact that a city is never finished but is constantly being designed and transformed anew. A building structure gives an impression of what a building will become, though the structure is not yet definite and more often resembles the searching lines of a sketch. I reflect this ever-changing urban landscape in an expressive representation of it. My images stem from reality but at the same time, I endeavour to separate them from that and allow them to move towards the imaginary. And just as the frayed edges of a city or the structures and screens around a building fascinate me, it is precisely this boundary that has my attention. It leads to spaces within which it is unclear what exactly you must or can do and structures that can still take on all the shapes of a building or something completely different. In my quest for the creation of such 'gaps', I started sawing my woodcuts in pieces and printing them again, mixed up, as a collage. Folding these prints resulted in the spaciousness and illogical perspectives I was looking for. I then put the sawn pieces of woodcuts back together again, in spatial installations. They have become small, almost theatrical objects; models you could recreate on a large scale. I illuminated some of these objects, to play with their shadows that repeatedly display new moving structures as an image of an endlessly transforming city.