About Jesska Hannigan

Welcome!

I'm Jesska Hannigan, an Australian artist working and living on Kaurna Country.

My art is shaped by travel, memory, family history and a lifelong connection to the Australian rural landscape.

I am drawn mostly to light, the way it touches the world and all the things around it, from subtle shifts to massive incredible skies and reflections. There is a feeling a landscape can hold you, and know you even long after you have left it.

Each painting begins with something personal, a place I have travelled, a family story a remembered landscape or a moment I don't want to lose.

I finished my degree in contemporary art in 2012 whilst simultaneously raising a small human & working a career as a tattoo apprentice. For more than 15 years I have worked professionally as a tattoo artist, building a practice cantered around drawing, colour, composition, storytelling and connection with people. It has been an honour to have such a long career, and to have adorned so many humans.

I am the owner of the Paper Moon Arts Collective an Adelaide based tattoo and creative studio I established 9 years ago as a welcoming space for artists and clients. During this time I also welcomed a husband and 2 new babes to my life.

Tattooing has shaped the way I approach painting more than I once realised. Years spent translating people's stories into permanent artworks taught me to listen closely, work with meaning and create pieces that are deeply personal.

Painting has become another expression of that same instinct, only now I am telling stories of my own.

Rural Australia is a part of my family story. Both sides of my family have lived, worked, owned and belonged to cattle station and outback life, and those wide remote landscapes continue to influence the way I see and paint.

My work often returns to those places, sometimes through direct experience, sometimes through photographs and sometimes through stories passed down through generations.

Painting allows me to bring those fragments together; landscapes memory and the people and stories connected to them.

In 2023 I lost my mum to a short and brutal fight with brain cancer. When my world collapsed around me painting became a way of returning to myself and to a part of my creative practice that had been waiting quietly in the background to help me back to my feet.

What began a deeply personal way of processing love and loss memory and grief gradually became central to my work.

Many of my artworks explore the relationship between permanence and impermanence. People, places and moments that change while also remaining part of us.

I work predominatly in oils , building paintings through direct observation, en plein air and photographs. My practice moves between Australian landscapes, personal narrative and commissioned works that preserve places and people.

I hold a bachelor of contemporary art from the university of South Australia and continue developing my paintings practice through an associates degree with Adelaide central school of art.

Alongside original paintings, selected works are professionally reproduced with Archival fine art paper and canvas editions with some canvas editions individually hand embellished in my studio.

Take a piece of the landscape with you.

Explore original paintings and fine art editions, or commission a landscape created from a place you love.

Jesska x