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Hatty draws on a wide range of fashion, familial, artistic, historical and theatrical references to create
meticulously handcrafted work work that exists between abstraction and figuration. She focuses on formal and material invention, rather than transparent visibility, as a means of visual and material resistance.
Fuelled by a love of fashion, form and material, Hatty creates meticulously handcrafted work from a wide range of made and found materials including cloth, plastic, plaster, pigment, faux fur and lace. Through personal narratives and memories, she examines the complex nature of individuality and the behaviours that mediate it, as well as the wider psychological implications of trauma and recovery.
Hatty'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. She focuses on formal and material invention, rather than transparent visibility, as a means of visual and material resistance.
Aged fourteen and a natural loner seeking escape, Hatty immersed herself in London's underground culture of the 1980s and beyond, thanks to progressive parents who dropped her off with a fiver for her cab fare home. There, amongst the criminals, poets, musicians, sex workers, fashionistas, drag and burlesque queens of a myriad subcultures she observed the unspooling stories of a host of unconventional characters.
She subsequently worked for over a decade in the flamboyant world of theatre production, where she met an array of writers, actors, musicians, and designers, many of them Broadway legends and National Treasures.
Hatty uses the fluid possibilities of abstraction to probe how different realities might co-exist and what it is to live on the margins. With a refusal of purified techniques and materials, she creates unexpected but delicate combinations of materials drawn from a range of contexts and meanings, as medium specificity gives way to a subversively ambiguous mixture of style and media. That we see things are frayed, folded, pieced together and re-constructed is intended to create meaning making.
Yet her work is also soaked with art-historical references and a theatrical exuberance, combined to create a tension between formal authority and nonconformist energy. Typically fusing oil painted artist canvas in pastel hues with faux fur, fashion industry waste, wet look surfaces, feathers and shiny threads, Hatty drags past aesthetics into the present, reworking and reimagining mid-century forms of abstraction to create work that offers direct challenges to representational and categorical legibility.
Working with textiles situates Hatty's practice within histories of classed and gendered marginalisation, and a lineage of artists reclaiming cloth as a powerful language for re-thinking identity.