Artist returns to gallery that inspired her

AN artist inspired by Warrington Museum and Art Gallery’s collection has returned to the venue with an exhibition of her own.
Hannah Leighton-Boyce’s works range from site-specific and ephemeral actions, to drawing, sound and installation, and her working methods combine material and process-led exploration with present day and archival research.
She explores place, object and body relations through themes of surface and erasure, embodiment and connectivity.
For Dreaming of Dead Fish, her solo exhibition at Warrington Museum and Art Gallery, Leighton-Boyce has developed a series of newly-commissioned works using un-accessioned items in the museum collection alongside glass, soot, slide film and projection.
This new body of work, commissioned by Warrington Contemporary Arts Festival with funding from Arts Council England, has been inspired by items in the museum’s ephemera collection.
The Invisible Girl, for example, is a Victorian object of curiosity on display in the Warrington Town Hall 1840 exhibition, within which a diminutive figure was either suspended in mid-air in a globe or represented through a disembodied voice.
Visibility, separation and embodiment have fed into Hannah’s research and studio practice.
The relationship between the works and their environment, and the materials and processes chosen, capture senses of longing and touch, proximity and distance; acting like a series of extended moments and pauses, they attest to the fragility of experience.
Accompanying the exhibition is a newly commissioned essay by Dr Craig Staff.
Hannah Leighton-Boyce lives and works in Manchester.