2010 has been a good year for Hanna Pettyjohn because she has finally finished the project she started some years ago. The project was a personal mission to search for the missing or unclear pieces of her family’s history, and to come to terms with them. It was a mission that took her to Texas last 2006 to get to know the American grandfather she only heard about, and that led her to uncover the story of her grandparents’ time together. Pettyjohn had many questions about a crucial part of her identity.

The result of her search is her second show at SLab, Year of Glad, which is composed of four paintings of the people and the information she found along the way. On December 4, Saturday, Pettyjohn talks about this journey of self-discovery.

Join us at Slab as Pettyjohn walks us through her work. It is a family album where there was none before. She paints her own pictures and is now putting them together to piece the story that threads them all.

Words by Bea Davila

In One Piece

2010 has been a good year for Hanna Pettyjohn because she has finally finished the project she started some years ago.The project was a personal mission to search for the missing or unclear pieces of her family’s history, and to come to terms with them. It was a mission that took her to Texas last 2006 to get to know the American grandfather she only heard about, and that led her to uncover the story of her grandparents’ time together. Pettyjohn had many questions about a crucial part of her identity.

The result of her search is her second show at SLab, Year of Glad, which is composed of four paintings of the people and the information she found along the way. Through her work, she creates a family album where there was none before. She paints her own pictures and is now putting them together to piece the story that threads them all.

To process the gathered information, Pettyjohn puts each large painting into a room of its own. She constructs four rooms to compartmentalize the different, even opposing, details of her identity. She lets each painting stand on its own “as a method of understanding and reconciling them.”

Year of Glad is a recap of her journey of self-discovery. The missing pieces have been found and laid out, ready for her to take a step back and take it all in. Her album is complete.There is now clarity and fullness to her identity... most importantly, an informed acceptance.

Words by Bea Davila

As a child, Hanna Pettyjohn, mimicking her father’s work (of renowned local potter Jon Pettyjohn), imitating expert fingers form clay, and taking this to task, she’s learned how touch and sensitivity make you an artisan of many other things, materializing her ideas in oil on canvas. As a writer, she derives her inspiration from her literary compositions and translates these excerpts into artworks.