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Running through this sculptural work is a flamboyance and theatricality that adds a distinctive, personal touch. Hatty breaths life into these inanimate objects, incorporating materials that resonate with her personal experiences and through which she translates relationships into sculptural forms.
Created during lockdown 2020, FRENEMIES, YOU ME & EVERYONE, and OUTSIDERS & MISFITS are a body of small table-top and wall sculptures that extend Hatty's curiosity beyond formal and material appreciation to an interest in the power dynamics attached to personal experience.
A portmanteau of "friend" and "enemy", FRENEMIES takes difficult, messy, competitive friendships as it's point of departure. Finding a formal parallel for the unpredictable and ambivalent nature of these relationships, each item in the sculpture depends on the others within the configuration. Nothing is independent. Individual parts use each other, but the status of user or used remains intentionally unclear and the sculptures seem to create a unique universe of interrelations.
The underlying paradox of friend/enemy is extrapolated through a series of dialogues running through each piece: balance/unbalance, control/release, lightness/mass, hard/soft, natural/manufactured, contradictions that evoke the kinds of dualities and tensions inherent in our relationships.
Exloring the productive friction between opposites also lies at the heart of OUTSIDERS & MISFITS. Outsiders hark back to the 1980s illegal warehouse scene that sprang-up in disused buildings all over London as an antidote to the more established mainstream club scene. It was DIY culture born of the need to create spaces in which the younger generation could express themselves and state their difference from the prevailing order of the day.
Taking a cue from these acts of resistance and release, Outsiders and Misfits manifests the way in which liberty and structure are intrinsically intertwined: resistance is made possible when it is underpinned by a formal authority.
YOU ME & EVERYONE summons a world of playful characters, half-conjured narratives and gentle musings reduced to essences of materials, forms and sensations. Typical of Hatty's work, materials more usually associated with a domestic context are combined to create texturally appealing works. Bringing together brass, aluminium, synthetic fur and sticky tape to explore contradictory notions of reality and artificiality, the work proposes a playfully serious approach to the construction of identity.
Running through this new body of sculptural work is a flamboyance and theatricality that adds a distinctive, personal touch. Hatty breaths life into these inanimate objects, incorporating materials that resonate with her personal experiences and through which she translates relationships into sculptural forms.
Despite their compositional beauty and precision, all the objects in this body of work appear to be temporarily put together, as if transported directly from the artists' studio during the latest round of experimentation on material capacities, balance and form. The objects seem to speak about some of the key questions of artistic production - they celebrate the artist as an investigator, an inventor and a player, as one who simply does not take any conditions as a given. They celebrate intimacy and smallness, fragility and vulnerability.