Self Portrait
soap, metal, gravity bag
2026

Hannah Peddie Miller

My creative practice is profoundly shaped by the intertwined experiences of faith, family, and the events that have informed my relationship to the human body. Working primarily through painting and sculpture, I use the figure as a site through which to negotiate the space between the sacred and the profane, intimacy and violence, devotion and desire.

My work begins with the body—not as an idealized form, but as a site of vulnerability, consumption, guilt, care, and longing. I am interested in moments when reverence slips into appetite, when tenderness becomes parasitic, and when love reveals its capacity for both protection and harm. Through painting, I stage encounters that resist fixed narratives, instead inhabiting the unstable territory between the desired and the condemned, the sacred and the taboo.

Influenced by personal and familial experiences, my paintings explore how bodies become entangled within relationships and systems of belief. Figures appear in states of exposure, dependency, and transformation: crouched in fields, suspended within domestic interiors, or occupying landscapes charged with memory and ritual. These spaces function as psychological and emotional terrains in which acts of care, consumption, grief, and devotion become inseparable. I am interested in moments when reverence slips into appetite, when care becomes parasitic, and when love reveals its teeth.

While themes of cannibalism, bodily decline, abjection, and mortality recur throughout my practice, I have come to understand that these are not my central concerns in isolation. Rather, I am interested in the ways care, intimacy, consumption, and vulnerability become entangled within human relationships. The unresolved questions that emerge from these intersections find their voice in my work, as I continue to navigate the complexities of family, faith, desire, and the persistent tension between the flesh as a site of both devotion and transgression.