About

Hatty Buchanan's practice centres on the evocative power of cloth. Drawing on its inherent connection to the body and memory, she articulates her personal experiences and collective narratives of trauma, as well as to suggest the recuperative potential of working with fabric and thread.

She regualry employs objects rich in symbolic association, particularly those tied to gendered experience: personal garments, fragments of childhood fabrics and vintage domestic textiles speak of bodily intimacy and the familial sphere of women. These objects, bearing the subtle marks of time, become potent metaphors. Cloth, with its inherent malleability, allows Buchanan to express a spectrum of human experience, from the raw depiction of pain and violence to the delicate suggestion of healing and repair.

Buchanan's artistic process is one of both destruction and creation, a rhythmic cycle of unmaking and remaking. Through the acts of deconstruction and reconstruction, familiar objects are stripped of their original purpose and recontextualized, becoming vehicles for revisited and reimagined stories. Time and memory are rendered fluid, their narratives open to reinterpretation.

Buchanan's artistic language is deeply rooted in the explorations of material and process pioneered by second-wave feminist and queer artists. She employs abstraction as a tool to unpack the complexities of gender, politics, and personal experience. Her work represents a conscious disruption of traditional formal abstraction, a revitalization through material innovation and acts of artistic resistance.

Her eclectic choice of source material, art historical references, stained clothing, fragments of language and mnemonic symbols, when taken together, establish a deeply personal and intimate constellation of her lived experience. It is a visual language that speaks of lived experience, woven with threads of vulnerability and resilience.