Artist Statement

Hanna Cantillana’s artistic practice is grounded in a tactile, material engagement with image-making. A dialogue between body, thought, and surface. Working primarily with intaglio printmaking and drawing, she explores how physical processes and traditional techniques can become tools for reflection, intuition, and transformation.

Through the weight of print and the lightness of line, she moves between resistance and flow, the press’s pressure against the plate, the drypoint burr catching ink, the subtle tremble of graphite on paper. These material actions are not merely technical steps; they are acts of thinking in and through the hand. The sketch becomes a site of experimentation, where inner images, impulses, and questions are given form through process itself.

Cantillana’s images do not depict the fixed or static – rather, they reveal gestures in motion, imprints of thought, traces of presence. Each mark holds the memory of movement, each surface becomes a witness to an unfolding. For her, drawing is both a ritual and a necessity, a daily practice that opens space for visual thinking beyond the verbal or defined. At the core of her practice lies a deep respect for craftsmanship, not as nostalgia, but as a living method of inquiry, where tradition is continuously reimagined through contemporary experience.

She holds a BA and MA in Graphic Art and Drawing from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Sweden and internationally. Her work brings classical print techniques into conversation with experimental drawing and intuitive image-making, always rooted in the physicality of the process.

MFA graduate from Oslo National Academy of the Arts & member of Grafiska Sällskapet in Stockholm, Konstnärshuset, KRO and SKF.

Based in Sweden

Printmaking and drawing

Analog filmmaking

Instagram: @hannacantillana

Shop at: www.grafiskasallskapet.se
www.konstnarshuset.org/bilddatabasen