Hannah Beehre
Artist Profile:
Practice: Drawing, painting, installation
Location: Ōtautahi Christchurch / Lyttelton, Aotearoa New Zealand
Hannah Beehre is an artist whose work moves between drawing, painting, and large-scale installation. Over more than twenty years of professional practice she has exhibited widely across Aotearoa and overseas, creating immersive, imaginative worlds that sit somewhere between science, myth, and magic.
Her work is driven by a deep fascination with the natural world—especially the cosmic, the sublime, and the slightly monstrous. From velvet nebulae that shimmer like distant galaxies, to sprawling animal epics and intricate drawings, Hannah’s practice constantly plays with wonder, scale, and the edges of the unknown.
Styx Creative Communicator –
Working with the River
In 2023 Hannah began a Creative Communicator project with the Styx Living Laboratory Trust, focusing on the Pūharakekenui | Styx River.
The project started as an attempt to draw with the river, using its waters and currents as collaborators in her mark-making. Over time, the river “redirected” the work, leading Hannah towards writing and an illustrated book that tells the story of listening to the river—what it had to say about connection, human nature, and the future of the city.
As part of this role she has led gentle, place-based experiences in the Styx catchment, guiding people through some of her favourite and least favourite spots along the river and inviting them to notice, imagine, and reflect. This work continues her long-standing interest in how art can help us pay attention to the more-than-human world.
Artistic Practice & Themes
Hannah’s practice ranges widely in media but is remarkably consistent in its core concerns.
Key aspects of her work include:
The magical and the sublime: Transforming scientific or everyday subjects—stars, animals, back gardens—into scenes that feel enchanted, uncanny, or otherworldly.
Immersive environments: Large-scale installations and multi-panel works that surround the viewer, inviting a bodily, sensory response rather than a purely intellectual one.
Nature, animals, and the monstrous: Creatures and landscapes appear again and again, often as mirrors for human behaviour, fears, and desires.
Flow and mark-making: A particular interest in the mental state of “flow” and how drawing can be a gateway into focused, playful, open-ended attention.
One of her best-known bodies of work, the Nebula series, reimagines deep-space imagery in dyed and painted velvet, studded with crystals. These works turn astronomical photographs into lush, tactile paintings that hover between science illustration, gothic glamour, and devotional object.
Another major project, Mures, et Terram (“mice and earth”), uses animals as the protagonists in a large, multi-panel visual epic, exploring our relationships with other species and the land.
Drawing, Flow & The Catastrophe
Drawing is a central strand in Hannah’s practice.
In 2016 she won the Parkin Drawing Prize for The Catastrophe, a charcoal, ink, and tea drawing populated by the creatures of her back garden. The work folds everyday observation into metaphor and myth, showing how ordinary life can tip into the strange and symbolic.
Her interest in how drawing “works” for makers led to a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury, where she researched the peak-performance mental state known as “flow” and its potential as a tool for teaching drawing. This research became Drawing in Flow: A Handbook, a practical guide that blends science, pedagogy, and art history to help people unlock creative confidence through mark-making.
She also regularly runs drawing workshops and public sessions, sharing ways to approach drawing that emphasise curiosity, process, and enjoyment rather than perfection.
Background & Recognition
Hannah studied at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts and has been a prominent figure in the Aotearoa art world for more than two decades.
Her achievements include:
Olivia Spencer Bower Award (2004) – a prestigious residency supporting emerging artists
Artist in Residence, Scott Base, Antarctica (Creative New Zealand) – an experience that informed later work around extreme environments and the sublime
Parkin Drawing Prize (2016) – for The Catastrophe
Master of Fine Arts (2019) – with research into flow states in drawing
She has exhibited at major galleries and public spaces across New Zealand, including Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, City Gallery Wellington, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, CoCA, The Physics Room, and Te Tuhi, as well as international venues. Her works are held in public and private collections in Aotearoa and overseas.
Ongoing Focus
Across drawing, painting, installation, and writing, some threads run consistently through Hannah’s practice:
Wonder and curiosity: Inviting viewers into experiences that feel magical, mysterious, or slightly uncanny.
Attention to the more-than-human world: Treating animals, rivers, galaxies, and cosmic phenomena as active presences rather than passive subjects.
Embodied experience: Creating works and environments that are felt physically—through texture, scale, darkness, sparkle, and sound—as much as they are seen.
Art as conversation: Using projects like the Styx river work, workshops, and books to open up dialogues about how we live with nature and with each other.
Hannah’s work offers viewers a chance to step sideways out of the everyday and into a world where a night sky can be velvet, a mouse can be a mythic hero, and a river can speak back if we learn how to listen.
