About the work

This new body of work, begun in late 2022, expands Hatty’s interest in re-styling older forms of abstraction, the use of unlikely or low-quality materials, rococo aesthetics, and a focus on behaviours and processes specific to textiles as a way of opening a dialogue around the complexities of individuality and the female experience.

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. This recent work exists in tender dialogue with traditions of quilting and textile practice, both in its technical approach and formal aesthetic. The abstract and expressive modes of cutting, stitching, splicing, and remixing are articulated throughout as performative and editorial acts of resistance.

For Hatty, this domestic material, associated with leisure or comfort is an ever-expanding field of experience, of mourning, loss, memory, and community. Inevitably there is also a relationship to the banner: existing both inside a space of protest and in a parade, a banner can be both festive and an act of refusal.

The artists canvas used as a foundation in each work has been ripped into fragments, and the consequences of that violence - the unravelling, frayed seams - remain on show. The visible, decorative and unfinished stitching provides an analogy for the construction of identity through performance and agency, and connects to the artists experience of trauma. Textiles are witnesses to everything.

Oil paint and traditional artists mediums are used to create pastel hued, glossy surfaces, spliced together with fake fur and neon thread, butted-up into logical and rule-based compositions posturing as Modernist icons. This promiscuous approach to materials and colour perverts the too-serious and the strait-laced in favour of the exaggerated and the playful.

Crumpled and damaged through the act of making, delicate combinations of colour, shape and texture create an ambiguous and provisional dialogue in which apparently incompatible parts co-exist, offering a direct challenge to stable identities and meanings.

Whilst these works are abstract, they are titled after once popular, now unfashionable women’s names. And like the women before them, Gladys, Petula and Doris are fluffy and messy, glossy, damaged, vulnerable but resistant, articulating an active space of becoming in which ambivalence and complexity dance together.

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