Sacred/Scarred Exhibition
June 5 - July 4, 2008

Keynote Address by Dr. Sarah Anita Clunis
Professor of Art History, Cornell College

"When I last wrote about Kaye Hanna’s work for an exhibition in 2006 I referred to her work as reminiscent of the pages of an abstract, organic bible. In this sense I think Hanna’s work has changed little. Her work still maintains a moody and delicate sensibility found within washes of color, hints of fossils, shells, and other organic matter, and her thoughtful calligraphic marks.

The works for this exhibition, Sacred/Scarred offer the viewer a more vibrant palette than the more muted tones of Hanna’s earlier paintings. Evidence of her connections to the colors of the Caribbean landscape and her memories of an idyllic childhood in the mountains of Mandeville can be clearly excavated from these works. Hanna often refers to her childhood in Mandeville as an influential period of her life where she felt a tremendous freedom that was the result of being able to run relatively wild in the natural landscape of her parents’ backyard. Similarly she refers to driving through fern gully as a child and stamping silver-back ferns on her hands as well as emerging from the gully and being blinded by the “opening in the sky.” Poetic sentiments such as these infuse the language of the paintings in this exhibition.

But it is not just this native and instinctive connection to the land that Hanna communicates with her work. There is also the biblical text obscured or partially hidden that she integrates into her paintings that alert us to her relationship to a benevolent creator. It is this relationship along with her more tenuous relationship with her often estranged father that Hanna negotiates in Sacred/Scarred. One theme of this show, therefore, explores her life-long connection to both an omnipotent creator and to an all-too-fallible parent.

Hanna’s religious and secular lives intersect and intercede in her work as a way to call our attention to the sacred and the scarred that are integral parts of our relationship with God, with nature, with words, and inevitably with people. Like a medieval scribe Hanna lovingly unfolds a tender and at times tragic tale of a life given for love and she exhibits the multifaceted interpretations of this truth on painted pages and with words and a symbolic abstract language, which is often blurred, hidden, and obscured, nevertheless her work speaks to us, with clarity, of the inevitability of creation and redemption and the soft smooth scars of sacrifice."