What if clothing could tell the whole story? Hannah Knox on painting 'portraits without people'

Growing up in Ealing with a fashion designer mother, artist Hannah Knox spent her childhood surrounded by dyed fabric drying in the bath, half-finished garments draped over chairs and trips to fashion shows. It's little wonder, then, that clothing became her lifelong obsession.

"What we wear becomes so synonymous with our lives that it's often almost impossible to separate the person from their clothing," Hannah tells Creative Boom. "Our taste reflects our attractions, desires, status, wealth, fandoms, class, and so much more." The idea that a fur coat or a slogan tee can hold an entire story without ever needing a body to fill it is what sits at the centre of her photorealistic oil paintings. In each, there's a signature close-cropped portrait of a collar, a zip, a knot of pleats, rendered in linen and turned into something that looks like real cloth.

Hannah's route here wasn't a straightforward one (but when are they ever, really?). After sixth form at Richmond Upon Thames College and a Fine Art BA at Middlesex University, she took a six-year detour through mural painting, set building, teaching and prop-making on James Cameron's Titanic, before landing at the Royal College of Art for her MA in Painting. In between, she "married, nursed my mum through cancer, divorced, lived on a boat, met a new partner, became a stepmum". Painting, she says, "was always the thing I came back to".

Her process starts from a song lyric, a catwalk look, a passer-by's jacket she glimpses on the street, followed by a scavenger hunt. "Sometimes I find what I'm looking for, and other times I trawl the internet and shops only to end up working from my imagination," she explains. Always working in oil on linen, Hannah builds her paintings up in layers, wrestling with "an internal battle of how much detail to add, and when to stop" – a tension that gives the work its curious tautness and an aesthetic that sits between hyperreal and handmade.

Take OK in Blue, a piece made for a show in Eindhoven that finally cracked a problem Hannah had been circling for years: how to fold language into paint. "I've been wanting to paint a series of slogan Tees but haven't yet found the right texts to make a full series," she says, admitting she's currently deep in a rabbit hole of badly translated printed T-shirts – "some of them are fantastically weird" – hunting for the next one-liner worth immortalising in oil. There's a looped pattern that gives the piece its texture, akin to the process of knitting itself. "The repetitive process of drawing these loops is not dissimilar to actual knitting, creating a sort of meditative space while I'm making the work."

Then there's Brown Fur, painted not long after a visit to a Beryl Cook exhibition sent Hannah thinking about fur coats – ageless things that could belong to "someone's nan or be worn by a singer in a rap video." Midway through painting it, something unplanned happened: the folds in the purple silk lining began to resemble a vulva, "surrounded by furry pubic hair". It's a moment she treasures because she didn't plan it. "This is one of my favourite things about painting," she says, "the surreal quality of turning this oily substance into shapes and forms that we recognise."

That accidental honesty runs through everything Hannah makes. Lately, she's been preoccupied with what gets left behind – "the shells we leave, all our stuff, landfill, echoes of a life lived and what we do with all these things after the people who inhabit them have gone". She adds, "I like that clothes represent eras and memories and markers of time. I'm an incredibly sentimental person and find getting rid of these things quite a challenge." She's also fascinated by the accumulation of things and the notion of desire, from shopping carts to wish-lists to the viral Asian shopping app that lets users "buy" items just to feel the thrill of it. "It's the thing without the thing," she says. "I think of my paintings as portraits without people."

Sharing a studio with her partner of 20 years, fellow painter Andrew Graves, Hannah splits her days between lunch breaks, small gestures of support, and negotiating the school run. What's next includes a summer residency, a commission for a London hotel, and a new, closer-cropped body of work leaning into 1970s archive photography – a deliberate push, she says, to "grow and shift away from that style without losing the essence of what makes your work recognisably yours."