For a long time, this digital space functioned like a traditional gallery storefront—a place to show finished collections and post occasional updates about exhibitions. But over the last few years, as my life and practice have moved across borders, my relationship with creative spaces has completely evolved.
I have always felt deeply at home in creative environments—whether I’m painting in the quiet of my studio, speaking on a stage, teaching in a classroom, or simply being present out in the field. But as I traveled between the light of Venice, the history of Vienna, the energy of New York and Paris, and my home here in Canada, I realized that “home” couldn’t just be a fixed coordinate on a map. I needed to take that visceral sense of creative belonging and make it mobile. I needed an incubator that could move with me.
Because of that, this website is shifting away from being a passive portfolio. It is turning into a living archive—an open door to the HannaTess studio-gallery entity.
What is Changing?
If you explore the new menu, you’ll see that the standard blog format has evolved into a space called Inquiry. This is where I am gathering my field notes, messy experiments, and quiet insights across five pillars that I am endlessly curious about:
- On Meaning: How we build invisible scaffolding out of visual symbols and signs.
- On Perception: The fascinating, volatile gap between what we actually look at and what we assume is there.
- On Creation: What happens when we strip away conditional validation and performative pressure to just participate in the work.
- On Environment: How our physical bodies and threshold states filter the way we think and see.
- On Identity: Navigating the nonverbal worlds we carry and finding ways to build bridges between our isolated minds.
Pull Up a Chair
The pieces you’ll find in the archives here aren’t formal academic lectures. I don’t look at myself as a researcher speaking from a pedestal; I am simply an experimental mind who is incredibly glad to lead and walk alongside others who share the same questions.
Whether you are an artist joining me for a live figure drawing workshop, a writer reading through these emerging essays, or a visitor browsing the gallery, you are no longer just looking at a screen. You are stepping into the room.
Thank you for being part of the thoughts, the experiments, and the beautiful instability of this moving studio.
— Maria Kelebeev