Contact hattyvhbuchanan@me.com

Instagram @buchananhatty

about

I work with textiles: whole cloths hung unstretched, pinned by their corners, sagging under their own weight. This refusal of painting's stretcher is the first critical act. My grounds are centuries deep - early 1700s handwoven wool, antique indigo-dyed silk, utilitarian linen - cloth made for use, carrying generations of anonymous, female maintenance and repair.

The surface is an accumulated record of all they have endured, and my hand extends it: inadequate strips of my own worn shirts, a thin 1950s child's dress, chaotic lines of machine stitching. My interventions place new bodies and create new histories in the cloth, each arriving without erasing what went before. Nothing is depicted; the work holds difficult experience materially, felt more than understood.

My practice is grounded in five decades of embodied textile knowledge and asks how people and materials carry damage over time: what survives, what becomes evidence, and who gets to decide. A self-authored archive extends the same enquiry beyond the studio, forming another layer through which ideas of authorship, value and dissemination are explored.

In a cultural moment that converts damage into content, accelerates past difficult experience and demands resolution, my work makes space for what those terms exclude: the tentative, the provisional, the quietly held. It insists on what has been marked, held under pressure, and continues.

Biography

Born 1967 in London

Hatty now lives in the Midlands.

Buchanan spent part of her childhood in Bangladesh and travelled extensively through Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America from the late 1970s through the 1990s, experiences that continue to shape how she looks and what she reaches for. She has worked across the creative industries for forty years - in West End and Broadway theatre production, early digital platforms, arts philanthropy, and the leadership of creative organisations - before turning full time to her practice.

Recent exhibitions include the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (2020, 2024, 2025), Ingram Prize Finalist (2025), and Ingram Prize curated presentation at London Art Fair (2026). Residencies include Cove Park, Scotland, and The Mothership, Yto Barrada’s artist-led project in Morocco.

Hatty's work is held in various private collections, including the Private Collection of Maureen Paley, and can be viewed on the White Columns Artists' Registry.