Hannah Murgatroyd’s work centres on the human - most recently children - as conduits of imagination, time, and resistance. Influenced by her upbringing between Dartmoor and the sea, her paintings explore the relationship between figure, place and interiority.

Painting for Murgatroyd is a hermetic space, the studio a vital current subject: a site of depth and refusal, sustaining of interior worlds. Backgrounded by drawing and writing, she works across large and small scales, employing an emotive, gestural mark to uncover ideas, selecting materials, colours and processes which slow time, illuminate tenderness.

Based in the South West of England, she is a mentor for Turps Art School. She taught herself to paint after her formal studies at the Royal College of Art (2005) and the Royal Drawing School (2006).

Her paintings were shown in Women Can’t Paint, curated by Marcus Harvey (2018), Monster/Beauty, curated by Marcelle Joseph at Lychee One (2020), and exhibitions at OHSH Projects, Alice Black, Cob Gallery, and Von Goetz.

Highly commended in the Contemporary British Painting Prize (2021), she won the Exeter Contemporary Painting Prize in 2014. Her solo, An Unbidden Quest was held at the Florence Trust (London, 2025) with Blackbird Rook and the Tom & Chai Hall Collection.