ArtPrize 2025: Caroline Hahn ‘In the Garden’s Maw’

3 Oct. 2025

By Justin Tiemeyer - Contributing Writer

Caroline Hahn’s three-painting series, titled “In the Garden’s Maw,” is currently on display at Collins Art Gallery on the fourth floor of Grand Rapids Community College’s Raleigh J. Finkelstein Hall.

“It’s tough to describe them,” said Hahn. “They’re difficult to describe because they’re meant to be dreamlike.”

The first painting is a depiction of a woman with a dog, titled “Fetch.” Only there is no dog, not really. “I like to tell people that there are often animals in my paintings, but I never actually paint animals,” Hahn said. “I only paint people.”

The woman and the dog are two different parts of the same personality. One is willing to wave around an object of power, and the other is hungry and willing to pick it up, if dropped. The people with flashlights in the background represent a sense of pending anxiety.

“You have a crazy dream, and you wake up, and you try to describe your dream to someone, and it just sounds dumb,” Hahn said. “I don’t really understand it completely until I make the painting and go through the entire process. For me, this one was about power and temptation in a dueling self.”

The second painting is “What Am I?” featuring a white horse acting as a guardian figure or a guide for a young girl. With these figures, Hahn depicts what it feels like for her to be a mother.

“What I’m most concerned with in my paintings, I don’t want there to be easy answers. I want there to be a deep sense of mystery to the work,” Hahn said. “I can pull out my phone and search the answer to anything. It’s a really demystifying time to be alive, but the world is still so full of mystery. I’m trying, with these paintings, to bring back the sense that we do live in a mysterious world. Sometimes the most mysterious thing about it is ourselves.”

The third painting, “Folly of Two,” appears to be a pair of unicorns sharing a horn. In 2016, Hahn visited the Musée de Cluny in Paris, where six late 15th-century tapestries, known as “The Lady and the Unicorn,” are housed. In these Renaissance-era pieces, unicorns have a different meaning than the “pink rainbows” vibe they give off these days, and Hahn’s painting plumbs those same depths. “I can vividly picture everything in that room, because it was such an impactful moment for me artistically,” Hahn said.

More and more these days, Hahn is getting obsessed with regionalism, this idea that a Michigan artist’s paintings should look like they come from Michigan, an Ohio artist’s from Ohio, and so on. In Hahn’s case, however, this concept requires a little bit of unpacking, because the term is usually used in connection with representational landscape art, and Hahn’s work is closer to what you might call psychological realism. To make it work, you have to understand Hahn’s surreal dream paintings as coming from the internal landscape of her own psyche.

“I can’t not be influenced by my surroundings,” Hahn said. “I live in Lowell. This is such a beautiful place. I can look out of my windows and see these incredibly dense forests.”

This past winter, Hahn kid-proofed her home studio as much as she could so she could have her two children, a three-year-old and a one-year-old, down there with her while she painted. “Right now, it feels like training with weights on,” Hahn said.

Her daughter has stopped taking naps and started painting with Hahn. “It’s really fun,” Hahn said. “It’s so deeply special to be able to have them with me and be a part of this process.”

When Hahn graduated from art school, she made art, but she did not know who she was making art for. More recently, Hahn found a mentor at Ghosthouse Fine Art Studio, she started teaching, and everything started falling into place.

“My journey to ArtPrize seemed like I wouldn’t get there for a little bit,” Hahn said. “All of a sudden, I found a fantastic community of fellow artists and art appreciators who believed in my work and helped me get there.”

Caroline Hahn’s “In the Garden’s Maw” is a three-painting series featuring “Fetch,” “What Am I?” and “Folly of Two,” and it is on display at Collins Art Gallery, on the fourth floor of Grand Rapids Community College’s Raleigh J. Finkelstein Hall (Vote ID 16898). Another of her pieces, which she painted over the span of a pregnancy, is part of the permanent collection at the Kalamazoo Institute of Art. For those interested in learning more about Hahn, her website is hahnstudio.art and her Instagram handle is @hahnstudio_art