Hannah Vaughn

Artist Statement

Hannah Vaughn is an artist, architect and educator based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Hannah’s work is centered around the primacy of making, craft as an expression of the value of things, and the necessary resourcefulness of building. The connection to material, people and place is expanded with a mission in practice to generate work that is both pragmatic and poetic - architecture that is responsible to the earth, the community and the future; spaces that silently frame meaningful human experience and have a positive impact beginning to end. Hannah holds an M.Arch from the University of Utah and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of New Mexico. She teaches design studio at the University of Utah School of Architecture as adjunct faculty, regularly serves on design juries, and is active in the creative and design communities of Utah and the Mountain West.

As part of her practice, Hannah frequently engages in studies that explore the connection to place. The intuitive and learned manipulation of materials - material as a medium of atmosphere, and the crafting of observations and objects as an underpinning of connection to the land that surrounds us. These studies culminate in the form of installations, organized discussions, remote performance installations, and various other permutations of inquiry. Exploration of the environment in which we live often reveals fragilities, strengths and tenuous co-evolutions.

In terms of grief:
Knowing that, eventually, we all join the inert. The temporarily inert. The sometimes distinct, the less distinct…the indistinct….extending beyond us. And, “We are almost as old as the Earth. Recent and rigorous, our time-counters bring back nature, in the sense where life was born billions of years ago. We are all immersed in the same alluvium” (Serres, Michel. The Incandescent). But alluvium is everchanging, and even the eternal sun will darken eventually, and there are many universes beyond our own. And there is no fixed point. No center. No end. No beginning. And we are part of it.

What relief.