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Soho Girls
Typical of Hatty's work, these typewriter pieces incorporate non-traditional materials - such as fringing, tassels and netting - usually found in the haberdashery department and linked with a tradition of women’s creativity.
Soho Girls draw on Hatty's teenage years exploring the myriad club-subcultures that emerged in London's Soho during the 1980s. Aged fourteen and a natural loner seeking an escape, she immersed herself in Soho's underground culture 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.
The work is produced on a manual typewriter - what now, in the face of computers, smart phones and 3D printers, might seem like an antiquated technology is in fact a simple but powerful analogue tool for the creative process. Each piece is made in a single, intense and sometimes frenzied session, giving them a performative quality where their appearance is influenced by the body's interaction with the machine - creating textile like fragments with a sense of movement.Looming large in this process-driven approach is a sense of craft, of individual, homespun fabrication over and against the manufacture of standardised commodities.Typical of Hatty's work, these typewriter pieces incorporate non-traditional materials - such as fringing, tassels and netting - usually found in the haberdashery department and linked with a tradition of women’s creativity.In these works Hatty continues her exploration of a pre-determined order and repetitive action to generate abstract images that upend traditional authorial notions of composition. Predominantly made using one, or occasionally two, punctuation symbols the choice of punctuation is relevant: not only are these keys physically situated at the margins of a typewriter keyboard, but punctuation is also a system of inserting symbols into text to aid interpretation. Both the physical location of the keys and their structural function evoke the spirit of a community operating outside the margins of convention with its own codes and signifiers.