Hannah Brewerton

Hannah Brewerton is an artist and filmmaker based in Newham, East London. A recent graduate of the RCA, Hannah has spent the past two years exploring creative processes related to narrative, documentary and experimental animation.

She has made two films to date: Bittersweet (2019) - an animated documentary based on the role that local industry has played in the lives of two women from the area around the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery in Silvertown, London; And Hit and Run (2020) - a narrative film that examines the farcical spectacle that is modern British politics.

In 2018, Hannah moved from a background in theatre and teaching to pursue a career in filmmaking. She was initially drawn to animation after her experience combining narrative storytelling and sound design with forms of shadow puppetry and installation during her undergraduate degree. While living for several years in Northern Italy she began experimenting with stop motion animation, taking a short course with Michelangelo Fornaro, before returning to London and independently building a portfolio of largely 2D hand-drawn animation.

Hannah has industry experience working for London-based studios and has worked across forms of 2D hand-drawn, digital, stop motion and experimental animation.

Hannah’s artistic practice sits within the field of creative non-fiction, finding creative means to engage with current issues in an honest and critical way. She is interested in why artists produce work, and where that work sits or how it performs within its cultural and historical context. She tends to use mixed media in filmmaking and employs a variety of approaches to image building as evidenced by the diversity of styles within her work. She is excited by the differing potentialities of both computer-based digital animation and films where the maker’s hand is more visible.

Her moving image portfolio engages with themes such as deindustrialisation, local landscapes, culture wars, loss, identity, the cult of the individual, humour, the absurd, and questions of agency. She draws inspiration from playwrights such as Dario Fo and Harold Pinter, as well as from social policy surrounding issues of inequality.

Her research so far has been concerned with: the shared histories of animation and print-based cartoon satire, carnival and the grotesque; post-digital cultures within political movements/activist groups; and how forms of animation can be used as a tool for demystifying publicly funded data.