Samuel Hanner

Bridge

Jackson's Art Prize 2026
Acrylic, Sand, Textural medium
Panel
26 x 36 cm

“Emanating from an expanded conception of painting I create scenarios that are in conflict with an established consensual reality and are themselves productive. For instance, the fiction of an artist living in a world of harmonious symbiosis between all life. Or the framework that painting is always in collaboration with liquid on the way to becoming solid, like a bog becoming land.  For this reason I began to predominantly use tinted liquids to paint with, whether they are watercolour, acrylic or oil based. I am searching for the invisible hand that conjures the face of Jesus from a stain on the ceiling.  Working in series and across media, from photographs taken across many years, I select images that seem to offer an alternative – departing from or challenging some norm. For instance, an impromptu collective pilgrimage, a way of organising life that is not economic or prioritised according to financial growth. “It is as if the side-paths have been overgrown and forgotten, as history tends to do” as Kai Althoff said. By interpreting my own photographs in painting, I offered myself the opportunity to create stories within the prevailing story of my reality. To find painterly realities in stories within stories.”