Cityscape takes some time out with local artist Hannah Beehre, whose celestial works Tunnel and Orion are lending some star power to SCAPE Public Art’s 2018 Season.

Your nebula work, Tunnel, creates a spectacular entrance to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the museum – how did this year’s theme Our Braided Future inform this work? Tunnel was actually meant to be a part of SCAPE Public Art Season 2017 Time in Space (Territories and Flow) but due to time constraints I was unable to move forward with the project that year. I think it’s quite interesting that a work due under that particular theme might be delayed and reappear at another time in a new location.

Walk us through your process for bringing Tunnel to fruition. Originally the work was going to be situated on the second floor of an old goods lift at the museum. The shaft had been divided up to serve the various floors and my initial idea was to reclaim the space by using a mirror to create the illusion of a void. When the new site was determined I realised I had the opportunity to create something that took you from one space to another so it became a kind of worm-hole. The tunnel is curved and the sight-lines carefully managed to ensure that there is a moment of total immersion.\

Tell us about your other work, Orion, which appears in the museum’s main foyer. Orion is the largest work I’ve attempted in one piece. It’s 6.5m long and 3m high and has about 2,800 crystals. I had to lay the dye out for it in one day, but it took me about 16 hours to work from one end to the other. I rinsed it out by throwing nzit over a fence at the School of Fine Arts and waterblasting it! Both Orion and Tunnel are based on features of the Southern Hemisphere night sky. The Orion Nebula is visible to the naked eye as the smudgy second star in the sword of Orion. The closest massive star nursery to us, it has these very intense features. It reminds me a little of some kind of fairytale landscape, the entrance to a cave or a clearing in a forest.

How do you manage your time and stress levels when it comes to creating commissions with specific deadlines like SCAPE? I am lucky to have had a fantastic team working with me. I have a wonderful assistant, Rebekkah Pickrill, who has helped me in applying the crystals since I first started making this kind of work. There are about 12,000 crystals on the two projects combined, so there was quite a bit of time spent on that part of the project. I’ve learnt to focus on one thing at a time. I know what I should be working on each day and I try not to think too much about the entire job, just what is in front of me. I also let go of the bits that other people are working on so they can do their thing.

How and when did your long-time obsession with the natural world begin? That’s hard to say. I think it’s always been there. But it has grown. It seems to me that the longer I look and the more I learn, the odder it gets. Nature is wonderful and terrifically strange.

You’ve been one of the lucky ones to land an Artist-in-Residence travelling to Antarctica, how are the skies different to the ones in Christchurch? It’s very different! There is no night sky to speak of during the summer season. The sun simply rotates around a few degrees above the horizon continuously. Due to the atmospheric conditions it is an interesting phenomenon to observe. Rainbows and halos around the sun, and something called a ‘sun dog’ where the sun is flanked by two false suns. It’s an extremely beautiful and wild place.

Tell us about your next work. I’m currently working on my MFA and I’m about to begin a large drawing which I hope to finish in March 2019. I’m documenting my brain states as I work, looking for evidence of a phenomenon known as ‘flow’. It’s a neural state associated with peak performance. I’m hoping to expand my understanding of it in order to access it more readily and reliably, and potentially teach it. It sounds like a very different kind of a project, but it’s really getting down to the nuts and bolts of what is happening when I’m working.

What music gets your creative synapses firing? I like things like Beck’s Morning Phase, Wilco, The War on Drugs and Future Islands as background music when I draw. If I’m starting a work I’ll listen to something a bit more obnoxious, something like Stereo MCs, Pulp, Elastica or The Breeders to get me past those crucial initial marks.

What’s the most flattering feedback you’ve received? In 2016, Judy Darragh called my drawing The Catastrophe “prophetic”. I was quite moved by that, especially coming from such a fabulous artist. I had a week working on Tunnel, on site and in public at the museum and folk were leaning over the barrier and looking in on us. The comments were just amazing, but one I loved the most was, “Whoa, that’s the craziest thing I ever saw!”

As both an artist and a musician, how does each creative discipline influence the other? I think drumming is a lot like drawing. You have to find a headspace where you are focused but not self-conscious. They are very similar in that respect. Often when I’m drawing I have the same sensation that I have when I’m drumming, that is, that I am listening very hard. It’s quite a different feeling to the sensation of looking very hard and I suppose it’s a bit odd that I associate that with drawing.

SCAPE Public Art Season 2018, to November 17, scapepublicart.org.nz