Hannah Knox’s paintings of collars, zips and buttoned up cardigans tell stories about the human condition

The decollete refers to the neckline area from the base of your throat to the top of the chest. It’s also the sole focus of artist Hannah Knox’s paintings – chunky zips, furry hoods, draw strings hanging off hoodies and buttoned up cardigan sweaters. Rendered through photorealistic oil paint on linen, these paintings may seem consistently about one thing – fashion – but they’re about so much more.

After graduating university with a MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2007, a few things shifted Hannah’s worldview: her mother passed away after a lengthy battle with cancer, Hannah’s marriage broke down and she suffered a miscarriage. In the aftermath of these events, Hannah began to intimately understand that the body is a vessel – a shell that we cover up, protect and shield from the “failings of the body”. Clothing suddenly took on new meanings.

“I focused on a few of my striped shirts, adjusting the garment for each new painting and I realised that if I folded the shirt (as you might find it in a shop or online) then it could fit exactly the format of the canvas,” says Hannah. Creating a trompe l'oeil effect and becoming a type of stand-in body, Hannah’s paintings reimagine the vessel of our personalities, status, sex appeal and identity by using images we so often see whilst shopping. “I grew up around fashion, clothing and fabric, my mum was a fashion designer, and after she died, I found myself with the challenge of what to do with all the clothes and garments that she had collected, made, and worn,” says Hannah. “These empty shells seemed to contain such significance, they are just clothes, but they seem to totally embody and represent the person who had worn them.”

Inspired by Claus Oldenberg’s Soft Sculptures and Magritte’s The Treachery Of Images, Hannah’s ideas about what painting could be drastically changed as the project progressed. As she began to depict fabric onto fabric, she began to see painting as a surrealist act in of itself, turning oily substances into what appears as physical, woven materials – and the meditative process of knitting mirrored the slowness of hyper-detailed painting. “The abstract patterns of a line or grid become a garment just by adding the shape of a collar,” says Hannah, “it can be quite a simple gesture that can open up a different interpretation.” In these paintings that refer to the decollete, an area on somebody’s body that we look at every day, the viewer is not just prompted to rethink how much meaning this fraction can hold but also the small proximities in which artists can tell expansive stories in these canvases.