Hannah Macfarlane

South Africa

Available works

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About the Artist

Hannah Macfarlane (b.1996) is a Cape Town-based artist who works experimentally at the intersection of fine art and craft. She uses traditional wool work techniques to engage with embodied catharsis and labour, and to underscore our connections to nature, the past and each other. Fascinated by the process of wet felting, as well as the broader material possibilities of working with wool, she explores a range of visual and tactile metaphors for intimacy and vulnerability.

Wet felting involves a transformation of wool fibres through a laborious process of rubbing using soap and hot water. In Macfarlane’s explanation of the process, “The continuous motions of rubbing, moulding, and shocking the fibres of carefully placed and torn wool is a meditative yet exhausting practice. The wool slowly transforms – shrinking, growing, and fusing from its previous form to another, sometimes unexpected one. Through externalising the internal, the artworks come to represent the inner and outer body, our tangible connectors to experiencing the world.” She always processes the wool from its natural state, sometimes hand-dying it and sometimes spinning it to produce yarns, performing ancient craft rituals that tie society, and women in particular, to the land and to nature in ways that have been all but forgotten.

Macfarlane holds a BA Fine Arts the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town. She has exhibited in multiple group exhibitions and art fairs in Johannesburg, Cape Town and London. In 2022, she was a Tilga Art Fund finalist, and was also awarded a residency at the South African Foundation For Contemporary Art’s residency centre in Knysna, South Africa.

Exhibitions

2026 Forthcoming, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town
2026 de:HUMANIZE, group exhibition, Sogn og Fjordane Museum, Førde, Norway
2026 Girls 3000, group exhibition, GIRLS GALLERY / Everard Read, Cape Town
2026 Restoring of Sight, group exhibition, Tilga Foundation / Southern Guild, Cape Town
2025 Try a Little Tenderness, with Amber Alcock, Association of Visual (AVA), Cape Town
2025 Cubicle Series, group exhibition, Everard Read, Cape Town
2025 Karoo Winter Wool Festival, Eastern Cape, South Africa
2025 What We Carry – Echoes of Self, Silence and the Weight of Being, group exhibition, Glen Carlou, Cape Town
2025 Fractured Foundations: Reimagining Resilience, Group show, Guns & Rain Johannesburg
2025 Investec Cape Town Art Fair, Guns & Rain, Cape Town
2024 Soft Power, Too, group exhibition at Guns & Rain, Johannesburg
2024 DECADE : 10 Years of Guns & Rain (group exhibition), Johannesburg
2023 Soft Power, Addis Fine Art Project Space with Gun & Rain, London
2022 FNB Art Joburg, Guns & Rain, Johannesburg
2022 Karoo National Arts Festival, Oudtshoorn, South Africa
2022 African Galleries Now, African Art Galleries Association, Artsy
2021 IN AND OF CULMINATION, ArtistLab, Latitudes Online
2021 Fresh Voices, Group Exhibition, Guns & Rain