About

Hannah Bestley Burt (b. 1990) is a fibre artist combining needle felting, basket weaving, loom-based constructions and embroidery embellishments in her sculpture practice. She crafts sculptural tapestries and votive soft sculptures which give voice to the unseen, tiny and allegedly unsightly understory of nature. Her work uses the lens of queer ecology to explore the more-than-human and to interrogate culturally constructed disgust instincts. Recent projects include a series of felted sculptures of potato tubers and blooming plasmodium-stage Slime Moulds, and woven wool wallhangings structured like mycelial networks.

An enduring focus of her practice is fungi. She crafted a series of ‘mycelium fragment’ wall-hangings; she weaves sculptural branching and fusing networks of mycelium using a process of double and triple weaving, bending and stretching the wool to create volume. She draws the filaments of her networks in non-perpendicular warp which allows the creation of organic, meandering forms seemingly grown as well as woven. 

Hananh’s votive soft sculptures often draw on the shapes and patterns of fungi and eukaryotic organisms. Through her work, she wants to elevate – to argue for and celebrate – the uncanny beauty of overlooked forms of life. She is fascinated by the inherent queerness, interconnectivity and symbiosis displayed by mycelium, slime moulds and lichen and how they complicate the idea and value of individuality through being both one and many. 

Hannah’s practice is grounded in urgent love for the overlooked natural world, the aesthetics of the imperfect and a belief in a political imperative to encourage radical joy. Her work remains political; it urges us to reevaluate our relationship with the natural world, and to venerate the small, slimy or unsightly. 

Hannah Bestley Burt was born London in 1990. She undertook a Foundation in Fine Art (Sculpture) at Camberwell College, UAL, before completing an undergraduate degree in Philosophy at UCL, a Masters in Women, Violence and Conflict at York University and short course in Curation at Sotheby’s Institute, London. 

Notable exhibitions and residencies include: a solo exhibition entitled ‘Underland’ at Aspex, Portsmouth October 2024–January 2025, and an artist residency with the Biophiliam, September 2022. British and International group exhibitions include the Radical Mycology Conference, October 2022, Oregon and Thrown Contemporary, November – January 2021-22, London.