A burst of hopeful colour.

My brother-in-law recently joked on a family FaceTime that we had the past, present and future on the call: he and my sister starting his birthday in Amsterdam, Mum at the end of the day in Kirikiriroa, and me lagging an hour behind in London. That’s more or less where Hannah Valentine’s sculptures found me: freshly moved to London and living in the past. Mum lived here at my age before she left for Aotearoa for good. She too walked along Fleet Street and rode the bus to save money. I feel her close. I’m living the life she once lived. It’s always now, it’s never now embraces time’s irregularity. It’s elasticity. The way past and present stretch apart and then suddenly snap back together.

In an email Valentine writes, “I’m interested in operating in the space between sculpture and jewellery, where works can relate to the body in a direct way, but can also hold space”. Her new suite of sculptures is almost exclusively hanging. Vine Tosca (927) dangles from a single point like a lonely earring, while Constellation (listen to a heart beat) falls in a series of deep necklace-like curves. Yet as I get to know these sculptures, adornment doesn’t seem to be the point at all. Touch is. And time, or rather, presence.

When I speak to the artist, she says, “Everything begins with either clay or wax—soft wax so my fingerprints become very evident. I also press in seeds and leaves from the garden, things from my direct environment. From wax I turn things into bronze.” Frequently Valentine knots bronze and ceramic pieces to lengths of brightly coloured cord. She plaits sewing thread and fine-line marine cord together by hand, creating rope that is delicate but strong. The vibrant thread reaches back to Valentine’s mum (who sewed many of her childhood clothes) and memories of thread scattered throughout the house.

Several sculptures are made up of tiny objects: stacked neatly on a thin metal rod (Vine (Apollo)); sprouting from cord like leaves on a vine (Constellation (at its point of contact with the body)); or bunched together in a jostle of textures and shapes (Seeds of possibility 5). Valentine forms the small segments by hand. It’s slow. Methodical. Compatible with motherhood. Her two sons, aged three and five, love playing with clay and are often the ones leading the charge. She sets them up outside and works alongside them. Valentine tells me she’s been thinking about the emphasis on developing the senses when kids are really little. Why should this stop in adulthood? Her Seeds of possibility series grew from research into historical rattles. “People would tie things together with cord—bits of shell, nuts—to make noise and activate the senses.” Seeds of possibility 5 combines ceramic and bronze flowers, coils and hourglass shapes. These tiny tokens of growth and the passage of time are reminders that things are constantly changing, to take notice and stay curious. You can hear it, can’t you? The joyful din they’d make jangling together.

We pause after the spacious, suspended sculptures at a series of static bronzes, Taking form 3, 4, and 5. This trio feels organic, of the earth. Sage, kōwhai, thyme and rewarewa are visible in their puckered surfaces. The grooves make me want to squeeze clay between my fingers. Tactility. It’s an ongoing investigation in Valentine’s sculptures. Her 2016 installation Grips, slips, of space, a memory (Te Tuhi) invited visitors to choose a small bronze sculpture to carry around while they explored the gallery. Valentine granted permission not only to touch, but to really get to know an object: its weight, temperature, texture. The imprint of her hands. She facilitated an intimate, open, human encounter. For Your body often knows more than you do (Page Galleries, 2022) Valentine hung metal bars and geometric shapes from climbing rope, silently daring visitors to grab, pull and swing. Her interest in touch and movement is inevitably tied to the rampant use of tech and AI. In her 2017 master’s thesis she writes, “It feels pressing to question how a heightened engagement with digital and virtual space will impact an understanding of our very corporeality—of our physical capacities, of sensory engagement, and of tangible presence.”

‘It’s always now, it’s never now’ is a quote from Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital (2023). Living in a space station, six astronauts look down on earth. Round and round they go, circling our planet 16 times a day. Continents, seasons, days, nights, sunrises, sunsets all sliding past like clicks of a View-Master. Time loses all meaning. One day is impossibly long yet time rushes past. Valentine says early motherhood shifted her experience of time, “I found time expanded and contracted when I had kids. 24 hours became three-hour cycles then four, bodily rhythms shifted.” In Indigenous Irish culture, time is non-linear. It incorporates the otherworld where stories tell of those both old and young at once. Valentine is learning about her Irish whakapapa, reading Irish mythology so she can pass these stories on to her kids. The metal beam extending through It’s always now, it’s never now acts as a non-linear timeline. Hanging objects punctuate it like events, often holding past and present together: rewarewa leaves from the tree growing above her son’s placenta; pumpkin seeds for the first food her kids ate; a diamond shape carved into rock 5,000 years ago and now familiar as Gemini, Google’s AI assistant. They’re pieces of Valentine’s world and pieces of our time.

I’m struck by the positivity in Harvey’s description of earth from above: “The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour.” It’s a relief to remember the constant movement of time, weather, seasons. The moon around the earth. The earth around the sun. All completely out of our control. Can we pay attention? Be awake to the miracles of the natural world? Valentine’s sculptures ask us to try. To sense and feel. To be human.

— Hester Rowan.