Art and Heritage Online Database

Object Type: painting
Artist/Maker: Cutt, Hannah
Place Made: Gray's School of Art
Date: 2022
Media/Materials: Oil, couloured pencil and soft pastel on canvas
Dimensions: overall: 26 cm x 21 cm
Awards: RGU Drawing and Painting Purchase Award
Classification: Painting

Description:

Background is made up of abstracted forms evoking plants and a bright moon overhead. Foreground features a close up of an elbow red with blood.

She Intentionally Grazed Her Elbows

The idea for this painting came from the universal childhood experience of falling over outside when playing, and grazing your elbows. With the initial idea coming from a short piece of writing that I wrote*. I placed my adult-self within this childhood scenario, this desperate attempt to recreate this now long past experience. The concept of scratching away at you elbows as an adult until they are bleeding and red raw. Hopelessly trying to replicate that feeling from childhood, with an intense desire to feel what life once was like before layers of uncomfortable events and experiences were placed upon you. The grazed elbow becoming a metaphor for the pain that coexists alongside the warmth of nostalgic longing. The reality being that no matter how hard you try to relive this childhood experience, it does not change the fact that it is now something lost to time, a feeling that one can truly never get back.



*Elbows


“Isn’t it strange how I used to unintentionally scrape my elbows
when playing outside in the sun,
But now under the light of the moon,
Wrapped in my duvet
I intentionally scratch away at my elbows
Until they are red raw.

I try to replicate that feeling of warm sunny days,
But all I am left with are bleeding elbow.”

Object Number: ABDRG2022.21