Hannah McKellar

Hannah McKellar is a textile artist living and working on Gadigal/Wangal land (Sydney, Australia). Her practice navigates the intersections of embroidery, sculpture, and cartography, using slow, hand-stitched techniques to reinterpret mapping systems and reimagine our relationship to place. McKellar’s soft sculptural forms often echo the contours of topographic maps, landforms, and bodies of water, while her larger wall-based works take on the presence of golden shields—objects of protection and self-preservation.

Conceived as ‘portals’, her works act as windows into memory, place, and time—intimate memorials that hold emotional and spatial resonance. Hand embroidery is central to McKellar’s process: a contemplative and meditative act where the gesture of making takes precedence over aesthetic outcomes. This ritual of stitching becomes both a method of emotional release and a means of materialising internal landscapes.

In recent work, McKellar has turned her focus toward the multiplicity of ways in which place can be represented and experienced, as well as investigating inherited knowledge, ancestral connections, and the embodied skills passed down through generations. By challenging the authority and bias of traditional cartographic conventions, she seeks to unmap and reframe our understanding of place through a more intuitive, sensorial, and tactile lens.

McKellar graduated from the National Art School with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Printmaking) in 2015. McKellar has been selected as a finalist in a range of Art Prizes including Deakin Small Sculpture Award 2024; North Sydney Art Prize 2024; Wyndham Art Prize 2023; Brunswick Street Gallery’s Small Works Art Prize 2023 (Object Prize Winner); Fisher’s Ghost Art Award 2022; Environmental Art and Design Prize Northern Beaches 2022 and; Cooks River Small Sculpture Prize 2017 (Highly Commended). McKellar has participated in several local and interstate exhibitions including Petite Miniature Textiles, Wangaratta Art Gallery 2022; The Passion According to G.H, STACKS Projects 2019; Nothing is as Valuable as You, Peacock Gallery 2018; Art and Ecology Symposium, Bankstown Arts Centre, 2017 and; 50, Port Jackson Press 2015.

The artist acknowledges and pays respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander traditional custodians of the land she lives and works, and extends that respect to Elders, past, present and emerging.