Nina Hanley’s Surreal Realities

Nina Hanley is an emerging artist from Canungra in the Gold Coast Hinterland.

Entirely self-taught, Hanley won her first painting award in Grade One – the prize being a McDonald’s hamburger, a moment she still considers one of her finest. After a cadetship with the Gold Coast Bulletin, Hanley worked as a photojournalist for a decade before leaving the workforce to care fulltime for her physically disabled son.

Equally stimulated and isolated by the dense bushland surrounding her home, Hanley returned to painting as a form of meditation and distraction. Inspired by the ethos of the Surrealists and the iconography of vintage comic books, she began experimenting with digital technologies and multimedia platforms to bring an otherworldly quality to her work. Possessing a keen eye for the absurd and unlikely, she constructs symbolic fantasylands of subversive superheroes, mythical beasts and defiant girls who refuse to play nice. In 2016, she was named a finalist in one of Australia’s most important surveys of photographic practice, the Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award.

Whether rendered in paint or digital print, Hanley’s compositions are a wry commentary on the characters that populate her reality, providing an alternative view of her surroundings that is occasionally uncomfortable, often touching and always darkly funny.

Nina Hanley’s next solo exhibition is scheduled to open July 8th, 2017 at Dust Temple in Currumbin.