Hanna Cormick
Ecostage Pledger
Can you tell us something about yourself?
Hanna Cormick is a Finnish-Australian artist with Irish, Scottish, Cornish and Sámi ancestry. Hanna's body-as-mind bleeds across barriers—neurodivergent, synaesthete—creating in an arts practice equally as fluid and in flux, yet occupied primarily with physical embodiment. Having worked as a physical artist for twenty years, performing in Europe, Asia and Australia, Hanna has now been located for the last seven years in a safe-room on unceded Ngunnawal country (Canberra), traversing the deep inner waters of climate illness. Both Hanna's living and art are the practice of a body that stretches beyond the boundaries of skin to hold whole environments. Through a lense both ecosystemic and animistic, Hanna's body is used as a locus for more-than-human collaborators (environmental, microbial, sensorial); utilising processes of deep listening, informed by lived experience of sensory sensitivity, immunologic disability, and of a history as a trance performer, Hanna's body becomes a site of ritual and performance—a body danced by forces beyond, in a navigation of the ecological and microbial disharmony we have wrought in this epoch of the Anthropocene. Hanna works with a creative ethos that prioritises anti-extractivism, climate justice and access rights; nourishing relational ecologies of reciprocity and care, at scales of the intrapersonal, interpersonal and global. Recent artworks have centered around our innate interconnectedness as one biospheric entity, webs of interdependence, crip activism, and reclamation of body through radical visibility. Artworks have been performed both live (The Mermaid, Sydney Festival 2020), by proxy (Canary, Climate Change Theatre Action 2019), and by community (Dream/Remember, CCTA 2021). Hanna acknowledges the traditions and lineages carried in muscle and breath: as a mask carver apprenticed under the late Topeng master Ida Bagus Anom (Bali) and Commedia dell'Arte master Stefano Perocco di Meduna (Paris); and as a graduate of Charles Sturt University (Wiradjuri country) and Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq (Paris).
What was the turning point when you became ecologically aware and decided to take action?
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