Hannah G.

Will You Fly?
Credit: Hannah G.Artist Bio

Hannah is an artist, educator, and future art therapist. Her art combines cyanotypes, found objects, and botanicals to create narratives of daily existence. Before moving to Portland, Hannah taught kindergarten through eighth grade art in Memphis, Tennessee. She created and taught a culturally relevant art curriculum that grew students’ communication and self-efficacy through learning about past and present Memphis artists. Now in her third year at Lewis & Clark’s art therapy program, she is exploring how to create interactive books that foster communication in an art therapy setting. She is interning at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital and Family Solutions, a community mental health clinic, and completed her practicum at the Legacy Cancer Healing Center. Hannah is interested in continuing to explore themes of grief, death, and loss through an integrated existential, narrative, feminist, and queer lens. She is guided by neurobiological, grief-informed and trauma-informed practices and rooted in liberation psychology. When she’s not in class or at her internship you can find her: taking film photos, hiking with her partner, learning Python coding language, making cyanotypes, or reading Ocean Vuong.  

Artist Statement

For the past three years my art has explored nests, birds, flight, and sky which represents my journey in becoming an art therapist. Birds create nests from the resources they find, giving themselves a place to land between flights. In art therapy, a nest can be associated with containment, safety, and attachment. In this piece, I wanted to represent those themes while also asking the question Will You Fly?, which is another way of asking What Comes Next? The nest is assembled from layers of cyanotypes created with collected botanicals. These layered cyanotypes represent resources I have gathered during my time as a student, woven together to create a place to come back to and go from. To make it more sturdy, stable, and adaptable, parts of the nest had to be constructed, de-constructed, and constructed again in a new way. In becoming an art therapist parts of myself had to do the same. The nest reflects the environments the pieces were collected from. Some found objects have traveled with me from South Carolina and Memphis, while others were found in my backyard here in Portland. The botanicals and found objects incorporated into the nest add site-specificity to the piece, representing the many pieces of myself that come together to assemble my art therapist identity.

The nest is also a library of resources that I’ve created in the form of mini-zines. They illustrate how resourcing yourself allows you to better support others. The zines included in the nest library are available for anyone to take as needed. I created each zine at different points in my journey to meet needs that arose during my practicum, internship, and lived experiences. Topics of the zines include addressing grief, death, and loss with both adults and children; understanding trauma in the classroom; an aid for spending time in a doctor’s waiting room; and an interactive welcome book to art therapy. The nest has been crafted, and its gathered resources are offered back for others in different forms. So I ask you, and I ask myself, Will You Fly?