Meet Hannah Ribbens:
When I became a mother, six years ago we added up the costs of childcare against my non-profit job and realized it was more expensive for me to work and so I became a stay-at-home parent. I was overwhelmed as a new mom who could barely find time to shower much less pick up a paintbrush but somehow motherhood which appeared to pose an impassable barrier was also the catalyst to opening an unignorable desire to create art. After the birth of my second child, I started to find my footing as a mother and then as an artist. Suddenly, being a mother didn’t hold me back at all, on the contrary, it gave me the guts and creative energy in ways I couldn’t have predicted. Being an artist doesn’t have to look anyone way and I’ve learned that I can paint or draw even balancing a toddler on my back. Before becoming a mother, I worked at an orphanage in Honduras and then I joined the Peace Corps and lived and worked for several years in a small fishing village in Ecuador. I didn’t know it then but not only was I learning how to speak a new language I was learning to see the way I saw things were just one way and to value and learn from another perspective. That experience continues to inform how I approach painting and how I live my life.
My paintings center women, exploring their roles as protagonists in a world where they are often assigned value based on arbitrary beauty norms or their contributions are simply overlooked and ignored. I want to examine and question expectations of what it means to be a woman especially in the context of motherhood. I seek to challenge these assumptions through modifying, exaggerating and celebrating the beauty of the human form. I also employ collage to highlight the juxtaposition of the magical in the everyday, to paint the world around me as I want to rather than replicating it as it is.
