My work is made up of a wide range of materials, often using whatever is at hand. The pieces include recycled papers which are painted, cut up and collaged – often mixed with silk, thread, acrylic, graphite and ink. I look to use simple materials and enjoy the experimentation and the challenge of elevating them. This challenge becomes a design problem, the limitations in materials force creativity and the resulting works are highly textural and full of color. They provide an element of surprise for the viewer when the details are seen up close.
My background is in both apparel and product design. I have designed and developed a wide variety of products ranging from apparel, accessories, bags and toys. I find that my training as a designer often informs my work, as I see possibility in materials. Behind it all I am an artist with a love of translating what I see in my mind’s eye and bringing it to life. The best results occur when my worlds collide, art in design and design in art.
ABOUT
Hannah Rosenberg has always had a love of working with her hands. She studied apparel design at Drexel University, and worked for ten years in New York City designing and developing women’s clothing. She pursued her artwork in her small New York apartment creating, notably, a series of miniature chair sculptures. Later her career took her to California where she worked as both an apparel designer and product designer while also pursuing her artwork. She transitioned to two dimensional pieces, working in colored pencil, watercolor and eventually mixed media collage. Her later works in collage nodded back to her apparel design roots with the use of thread, stitching and fabrics mixed with recycled papers and paint. Through experimentation, her work became rich with texture, color and depth, using collage in her own unique way-in more of a painterly fashion. After several years in California, she pursued work in metal sculpture again, picking up where she left off fifteen years prior, as she began to interweave metal sculpture in between her other two dimensional works. Working in metal again allowed her the ability to experiment with materials in a new way, using what was readily at hand and mixing disparate materials together in her own signature style.