Private Hours presents Hannah Robinett’s manuscript-based works as contemporary meditations on devotion, secrecy, and disciplined introspection. Drawing from the devotional structure and visual language of medieval Books of Hours, Robinett reinterprets the illuminated manuscript as a contemporary site of inward reckoning. Rather than treating illumination as ornament, she adopts its compositional architecture: frame, margin, gilded surface, and scrip, as a disciplined system through which language becomes both material and meditative practice. In Robinett’s work, writing is not meant to be fully consumed; it is structured, disrupted, and re-presented as an object of contemplation.

In Book of Hours, Guilt (2025), composed of paper, acrylic, gold leaf, and thread, the artist begins by composing psalm-like reflections that she then ritualistically fragments. The handwritten text is sliced apart and carefully reassembled beneath gilded apertures that function simultaneously as sacred frames and acts of censorship. This oscillation between destruction and reconstruction becomes central to the work’s conceptual tension. Words remain visible, yet their meaning is obscured, and legibility gives way to presence. Alongside these textual ruptures, fields of color emerge. The swaths contain emotion rather than narrating it, and color becomes an interior register. The dominant blue, echoing the work’s title Guilt, operates as an affective atmosphere that is cool, contemplative, and heavy, suggesting the quiet persistence of remorse beneath the surface of ordered devotion.

Robinett’s use of gold leaf invokes the sacred luminosity of medieval illumination, but here it guards opacity rather than divine revelation. The thread binds the fragments together, emphasizing labor, repair, and the vulnerability inherent in self-examination. By structuring the composition to echo the temporal rhythm of a Book of Hours, Robinett recalls its original function, “the provision of stillness and deliberate ritual,” while transforming it into a contemporary meditation on secrecy, devotion, and the fragile threshold between confession and concealment.

- Curated by Phoebe Caswell