Hannah McGrenera

Hannah McGrenera is a multidisciplinary artist born in Taiwan and living in Ireland since 1994. She graduated from Crawford College of Art & Design in 2005 with an honours degree in Fine Art Sculpture. Her degree show brought together 24 free-hand line drawings and 48 cement floor tiles cast from everyday objects, an early expression of her interest in the ordinary, the repeated and the overlooked.

Her practice has developed across sculpture, drawing, printmaking, Chinese ink painting and metalwork. In 2019, she began working professionally in sterling silver, creating jewellery and miniature sculptural works. Conceived as small-scale sculptures, these pieces continued her interest in form, material and making at a more intimate scale.

Alongside this, McGrenera has continued to develop her drawing and fine art practice. Her current work marks a renewed focus on paper-based processes, including Chinese ink, drawing and printmaking from metal plates, while exploring the connections between paper and metal. She is also returning to large-scale welded metalwork, experimenting with scale and making small, ordinary things larger than life.

Her work draws on her Taiwanese heritage and her lived experience in Ireland, with an interest in identity, belonging, domestic life and the everyday. As she explores different materials and processes, her practice has become increasingly self-reflective, considering the search for balance between her life as a mother, artist and carer. Repeated gestures, familiar environments and ordinary rituals become ways of looking inward, while also examining wider ideas of home, identity and belonging.

Statement

My practice explores identity, belonging and the experience of home through the familiar and the everyday. I am interested in how ordinary objects, domestic spaces, repeated gestures and small rituals can hold personal and emotional meaning.

I work across drawing, Chinese ink, printmaking and metalwork, allowing the idea to decide the material. Increasingly, my focus is the language between metal and paper. My background in sculpture and metalwork shapes how I approach the page, bringing attention to structure, repetition, surface and the physical act of making. Printing from metal plates brings the two together: a mark made in metal and carried onto paper, each material depending on the other. The repetition of printing, the same gesture made again and again, echoes the daily rituals the work is about, and each impression holds both sameness and small difference. This exchange reflects the subject of the work itself, how different materials, cultures and ways of living can exist together and remain connected.

The work is informed by lived experience, particularly the complexities of balancing family, care and creative practice, and by periods of caring and grief that drew my attention to small, quiet moments. There is also an ongoing dialogue between my Taiwanese heritage and my life in Ireland. Through this, I explore how identity is formed through place, memory, family and everyday experience, and how a sense of home can be both tangible and continually evolving.

Rather than seeking fixed answers, I use making as a way to reflect, question and understand.