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Hatty transforms worn textiles into evocative objects that explore personal and collective stories of pain and healing.
My practice foregrounds the evocative power of cloth - worn, familiar, and intimate - to reckon with personal and collective stories of hurt and pain. I draw on fabric’s inherent connection to the body and memory to stitch relationships across rupture, weaving deeply personal narratives into material that speaks volumes.
Drawing inspiration from second-wave feminist and queer explorations of materials and process, gendered, political, and personal content is unpacked through abstraction. I regularly employ objects rich in symbolic association, particularly those tied to gendered experience. Used personal garments, fragments of childhood fabrics, and vintage domestic textiles speak of the familial sphere of women. These objects, subtly marked by time, become potent metaphors for a spectrum of human experience, from the raw depiction of pain and violence to the delicate suggestion of healing and repair.
Throughout my work, meaning is created through making, as the abstract and expressive modes of tearing, cutting, stitching, splicing, and dyeing are articulated as performative and editorial acts of resistance. Displayed on a ground reminiscent of an artist's canvas, the works are often in dialogue with the formalities of painting while also serving as a reminder of the cutting table from which the articles of clothing once came
Central to my artistic process is a rhythmic cycle of destruction and creation, of unmaking and remaking. Through these acts of deconstruction and reconstruction, familiar objects are stripped of their original purpose, challenging original meanings, and suggesting our history is under constant reappraisal.
A bridge between the past and present, my ongoing interest in re-appropriation and textile situates my practice within narratives of classed and gendered marginalisation. My eclectic choice of source material - stained clothing, found household textiles, plant-based dyes, art historical references, fragments of language, and mnemonic symbols - together establishes a deeply personal and intimate constellation of lived experience. This rich tapestry forms a visual language that speaks of lived experience, woven with threads of vulnerability and resilience.