Image by Laura Martinez

Statement

With my eyes closed, my left hand reads an object, its surface and the memory held at its edges, while my right hand records what it finds. The marks are not pictures of things. They are records of contact. Some drawings come from personal objects, others from museum artefacts.

I spin these touch drawings into 3D prints, then make moulds from them and cast them in clay. I push clay through the profiles of faces, so the face becomes a length of clay that keeps on coming. I burnish clay and graphite into dark surfaces, like looking into a well. I compress graphite and clay into objects solid enough to draw with.

A mould is touch made physical. Walter Benjamin argued that a copy loses the aura of the original. I think the aura is the touch, and a mould carries it through time and into new material, so what is gone is not quite gone. It is a kind of haunting.

Bio

Hannah Crosson is an artist based in Walthamstow, East London, working from Cultivate Artists Studio. She studied sculpture at Norwich University of the Arts and completed an MRes in Cultural Studies at the London Consortium. She spent a decade working with performance artists, learning that objects are what remain after something has happened, and a further decade in bronze patination, where she learnt that materials hold memory. In 2025 she began touch research with the Roman face pot collection at Colchester Castle Museum. She has co-hosted Death Cafés with Creating Conversations.

Her hands feature in On the Sly, a film by Justinien Tribillon shown at V&A East.