About

Hatty Buchanan's practice draws inspiration from second-wave feminist and queer explorations of materials and process as a way of unpacking gendered, political, and personal content through abstraction. In particular, the materiality of cloth and its specific behaviours are key to her work, as stories are told, untold and retold through their physical remaking. 

Cloth and textile become a form to be animated and challenged in Hatty's ongoing interrogation of uncanny psychological states in which bodies are abject and absent but the viewer's sense of self or scale becomes more acute. 

Combining the purposeful with chance, Buchanan's recent collaged tapestries of repurposed items of her own clothing draw attention to seemingly incidental details. The traces of wear and prior use that mark the garments call into focus the intimacy of our relationship with clothing and their potential for material memory. 

Torn away from their bodily counterparts, Buchanan collaborates with her past to rework the textiles into new compositions that derive their form from the experiences and memories held in the cloth. The abstract and expressive modes of cutting, stitching and splicing are articulated throughout as performative and editorial acts of resistance and redemption. Displayed on a ground reminiscent of an artist canvas, the works are often in dialogue with the formalities of painting as well as serving as a reminder of a cutting table from where the articles of clothing once came.

Mining her own history as well as interrogating more widely accepted values and histories, Hatty creates space for new ideas and understandings to emerge. Through the process of unmaking and remaking, familiar objects are systematically diverted from their original functions and frames of references into alternative contexts of meaning - repositioning clothing as entities with a shifting, enduring lifecycle rather than disposable goods and suggesting that history is under constant reappraisal.

Hatty's ongoing interest in re-appropriation and textile situate her practice within narratives of classed and gendered marginalisation and serve as vehicles for her exploration of overlapping ideas around trauma, identity and the internal narratives that inform us.