Hannah Walsh

Hannah Walsh is an Aotearoa New Zealand–born artist based in St Ives, working from her studio in Zennor, Cornwall. Her practice investigates the natural world at a micro scale, drawing on a deeply intuitive relationship with landscape and light.

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

Walsh works across oil painting, watercolour and mixed media. Her process centres on automatic mark making, developing a vocabulary of 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 employs shifts in scale and perspective to push the work toward abstraction. She conceives her paintings as intimate ‘micro worlds’—spaces that feel at once familiar and otherworldly, attuned to the shared energies between the human and natural realms.

STUDIO: CORNWALL, UK