Drawing from her experience growing up in the high country of the South Island, painter Rebecca Hasselman explores ways that memory creates and evokes a human relationship with landscapes. Hasselman paints specific landscapes she remembers, but removes perspective, and flattens and abstracts colours and forms. By doing this she articulates a thoughtful, personal connection to environments through the act and the resultant forms, made by painting. Sometimes painted around like a cut-out, these hazy, tonal forms are washed into, or seem to float on the canvas surface. Hasselman uses these formal considerations to create poetic spaces for contemplation, her works expressing a sense or memory of being within a landscape.

Rebecca Hasselman grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand’s rural South Island, and studied at The Leith School of Art, Edinburgh, Scotland before graduating from the University of Canterbury with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2014. Hasselman has since exhibited in Wellington with her solo exhibition Suspended Terrain at Toi Pōneke Gallery in 2019, Slumber Party at artist-run-space Meanwhile in 2017 and in the same year, Post-Landscape at dealer gallery Bartley and Company in 2017 where this work, Break 1 was first shown.