Hannah Rotwein

Hannah Rotwein is an artist based in Dallas, Texas, USA. She undertook a residency at Cel del Nord in the summer of 2022. Through a sculptural practice rooted in material experimentation, she makes objects that reference the textures, patterns, and textiles of home. During her time in Oristà she worked with gathered materials to develop sculptural works, and connected with the local Puig Ciutat archeological Roman dig site to inform her artistic choices.

She has a website hannahrotwein.com, and is the founder and curator of Post Gallery, an independent platform that supports emerging artists through quarterly postcard exhibitions.

What are you thinking about windows?

Windows...I've been thinking about windows since I was in undergrad, when I was making small paintings of cropped, mostly domestic infrastructure: corners, lights, tile meeting the bathtub, shadows, windows. Quotidian moments I'd happen upon and snap photos of.

With my more recent sculptural work, the window is a framing device. The terminology and conventions of painting very much play into my current sculptural work, especially in terms of how different elements and objects, be they different sculptures or smaller pieces within a larger work, relate to one another in terms of shape, texture, color, and emotional tenor. And framing: in the sculptural work, the window is a framing device, much like a canvas in a painting.

Façade (for Oristà) by Hannah Rotwein
2022
54” x 36” x 5”

Air dry clay, terracotta air dry clay, plant matter, pine cone, string, Sumi ink, spray paint, acrylic, graphite, found tile pieces, found snail shells, avocado bag, chalk, Elmer’s School Glue, food coloring, Ceys wood glue, wood, cement, paper, ribbon, pen, pebbles, receipt, found debris, plaster siding, rope, resin, cyanoacrylate glue, monofilament fishing line

Is it that the window animates what might have been a painting?

Not exactly. I like the idea of creating ambiguity between paintings and sculptures, and a sculpture of a window is a very direct way to do that. Much of my sculpture retains the rectangular aspect ratio of paintings as well, and this form too acts as a framing device, or a boundary to contain the work. I find sculpture to be much more overwhelming than painting, which makes it exciting. The possibilities are endless. I'm not sure if this is a conscious decision or something I'm just now able to articulate, but perhaps creating these frames, or windows, is a self-imposed limitation so that then I can devote myself to doing whatever I want within the bounds of that frame. I have to create a boundary somewhere, and I'm very comfortable with rectangular frames! I seem to think in terms of them, thanks to all my years painting.

The work depicts actual windows too, as well as being framed in the way you describe.

Yes. I’m interested in the dichotomies windows present between outdoor/indoor, public/private, and physical barrier/open to the eye. I like the idea of creating windows within artworks because it can activate all these ideas and lead to a different kind of interaction with the object. Not as a 2D surface to be looked at like a painting , but as something to be looked through, which then makes you wonder what the other side of the object looks like as well. A window activates a space differently than a wall for the fact that you can see through it, and I'm interested in playing with this idea in my work.

I also use a lot of wood glue in my work. It has varying degrees of opacity, and it often acts as a less translucent version of glass in my work.

Façada for Oristà by Hannah Rotwein. Photo Credit: **Kevin Todora**

When you work with materials 'off label', like the wood glue, is it harder to be too particular about the outcomes? Or is there perfectionism in there?

Oof yes, it is difficult to be particular when I try to push materials beyond their prescribed uses! That's part of the fun.

I like that wood glue mimics paint, that it's a liquid, and that I can dye it. I like that it has varying degrees of translucence and can hold its own as a solid once dry, unlike paint. It's very malleable, but also at the mercy of the elements; here in Texas, the glue softens in the heat and often warps.

It must be impossible to know what a piece will look like until you have seen how the material will behave, perhaps differently from one day to the next.

I'm always experimenting. I never know what will happen, and I find this really exciting. The factor of the unknown means a lot of things I make either break or simply don't work, but it also means I discover new processes which in turn inspire new ideas. It's a much more open approach than when I was painting, where I had a decent understanding of what the paint would do depending on how I put it down on the canvas. Of course there is room to explore and innovate in every field, but I think the kind of material exploration I’m doing now is more liberating for me.

Façade (for Dallas) by Hannah Rotwein
2022
45” x 57.25” x 18.25”
Concrete, air dry clay, found and collected objects, Gorilla wood glue, Ceys wood glue, Elmer’s School Glue, hot glue, photograph, cardboard, beeswax, string, twine, Sumi ink, acrylic, spray foam insulation, food coloring, paper pulp, graphite, colored pencil, concrete epoxy, red oak, wooden drawers, sandbags

But you are still a perfectionist in some ways.

I am a perfectionist; I'm always aware of that and often trying to counteract it. I don't believe the material exploration I do is some kind of psychological reaction to that, but it certainly forces me to let go. Process is integral to my work. It’s very generative. It makes me feel a bit unprepared sometimes, too. Many sculptors I know make meticulous plans before physically beginning a work. Sometimes I feel a bit phoney because I clearly don't work that way – not to say I'm not planning and thinking ahead, but I'm always adjusting and shifting the work while making it as I see how the materials respond. I’m not interested in making something if I know exactly what every step will look like and exactly how it will look in the end. That kind of approach ignores what can happen during the process.

What subject matter caught your attention while you were here in Orista?

I spent a lot of time outside while in Oristà. I had just come off three weeks of travel, including five days on the Camino de Santiago, where I collected broken tile pieces I found on the trail. I continued this process in Oristà, collecting mostly empty snail shells, dried plants, rocks, and bits of trash. I also spent time visiting and thinking about the nearby archaeological dig site, Puig Ciutat. I was thinking about layers, strata, history, and building materials. During my travels, I took lots of pictures of the visible strata of buildings: places where plaster peels off to reveal the concrete below, or where tiles and brick are missing and the mortar is visible. When I got to Oristà, I spent time looking at the architecture of the town and specifically of the Cel del Nord building. I was interested in the range of building materials, colors, and textures, as well as the building’s history and prior role in the town. Together, these practices helped me make work that was about place. The work I made is intimately tied to my summer travels and to Oristà–I couldn’t have made it anywhere else. Had I made it somewhere else, the work would have looked completely different.

Untitled (Hole Cheese) by Hannah Rotwein
2022
48” x 24” x 12”
Cast Elmer’s wood glue, string

What have you been working on since the residency?

I made maybe twenty-five small works during the residency and I brought them back to the States in my hiking backpack. They sat in my studio for a while as I tried to figure out their next step. I knew I wanted to combine them into a single piece, and I also wanted a display mechanism whereby the viewer could see both the front and back of each small work. I created a template of the pieces and experimented with a few different facades, but they felt too rigid, like the pieces were locked in. These facades ended up becoming other works, however–so the shapes and materials of my Oristà pieces have ricocheted through my practice since returning. One of these facades became Façade (for Dallas), which I showed in October and November, and which incorporated foraged materials from here in Dallas, Texas and involved lots of material experimentation, much like in Oristà. The other facade became Untitled (Cheesy Toast), which in turn inspired Untitled (Hole Cheese).

Eventually, I created a substrate of nylon rope for the residency pieces, which I then filled in with resin. The resulting work, Façade (for Oristà), hangs from the ceiling, is two-sided, and is see-through, so both the front and back of each piece is visible.

Up next, I’ll be participating in the spring residency at Sweet Pass Sculpture Park in Dallas. I’ll have six weeks to spend time at the park and make work for an outdoor setting. I’ve never made work intended for the outdoors before, but I think the residency should piggyback nicely on my experience in Oristà, especially given how much time I spent outdoors there and how generative it was.

Odette BradyFebruary 7, 2023