Hannah Adams's Projects

MFA Student

Major: Textile & Fashion Design

Graduation Year: 2019

Artist Statement:

Adams weaves to communicate the unusual and mystical; the silly and awe-inspiring; while challenging the Capitalist definition of “well-crafted.” She grounds her work in the redefining of cultural tropes found in craft and feminist theories to express softness, tenderness, and joy. Adams returns to traditional weaving patterns, in order to demonstrate how the structural logic of weaving can translate cultural data. Her work utilizes new applications and iterations of the overly ornate Overshot and Atwater-Bronson Lace weave structures. The Overshot and Atwater-Bronson Lace weave structures challenge the rhythm of the most culturally familiar woven objects, with large floats and images contained within the weave structures. Their unnecessary labor stands as a symbol of the undoing of the practical, Capitalist push for perfection.
In her most recent project, Peachy Keen, artist Hannah Adams underscores the potential of weaving to hold cultural data. Peachy Keen is a culmination of studio focus and research of textile history to establish tenderness and joy as a means to interrupt millennial ennui. This project consists of two weavings, which utilize plant-inspired imagery and disco balls as a celebratory portrait of the trope of millennial plant parenthood. As a millennial, Adams uses color and yarn to demonstrate how a return to weaving, a form of unnecessary labor, can highlight the tenderness, the squishy bits, of millennial ennui without judgment. Through the celebration of these soft spots, she argues for levity as a break from the weight of palpable discontent, a response to when life gives you lemons.

Biography:

Hannah Adams is a weaver based in Portland, Maine. She is an MFA candidate at Maine College of Art, where she works as a teaching assistant. Adams uses the logic of weaving to express softness, tenderness, and joy. While earning her BA at Simmons University, she studied drawing and the philosophy of Nietzsche and Existentialism. She is the founder of WeaveOn, a woven lifestyle brand and a soon-to-be pop-up art space. Adams is a native of Modesto, California and pushes herself to question the definition of home by way of cross-country moves to Boston, MA, Denver, CO, Portland, OR, and most recently Portland, ME, where she seeks beauty in the small moments of coastal living. The tenderness within her work comes from these acts of restabilizing and resettling.