Hanne Peeraer is a London-based Belgian artist who was raised in Italy. She is a recent graduate in Painting from the Royal College of Art. Her work has been exhibited in the UK, Belgium, France and Korea. In 2021, she was selected for New Contemporaries and received a grant from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation.

Her practice playfully explores the common ground between art and science. Working with installation and materials like paper, plaster, perspex and jesmonite, she makes us question reality by repurposing its relationship with art.

Peeraer transforms seemingly simple materials into signifiers of knowledge and meaning: major themes include human perception and our relationship to the natural world, aiming to heighten perceptual awareness and encourage positive change through self-reflection.

Although she looks for inspiration in science, Peeraer does not translate it directly into art. Rather, she approaches the topic from a place of intuition, developing the work with the aim of reaching people’s instinctive connection to the scientific realm. In this way, her work provides an alternative way to reveal these complex topics through the lens of magic, light, and play. Her research focuses on exploring how form relates to matter, with starting points of inspiration that include atmospheric optics, deep-sea creatures, human DNA, electricity, and various forms of flora. She looks to math for patterns of origami, to physics for perception and light refraction, or to biology to explore the form and function of seemingly otherworldly creatures.

Peeraer’s urge to create sprung from an exercise to heal from mourning in early life, and her practice today acts as a similar counterforce to the cynicism and resignation that comes up in the face of our world’s uncertain future. She pursues knowledge from different fields, inviting viewers to feel the urgency and call to action in a way that diagrams and data cannot.

Courtesy of artist’s website