Hatty Buchanan's gorgeous windows into fantasy feminisms and subterfuge fluff!
Cherry Smyth, Poet and Art Critic, March 2023
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L to R: Brenda (2022), Cynthia (2023) -
Expanding on Hatty's earlier Soho Girls, her recent textile assemblages continue an 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 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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Fuelled by a love of fashion, form, and material, Hatty draws on personal narratives to explore the complex nature of identity and the behaviours that mediate it through genre-bending work that exists between abstraction and figuration.
Her 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.
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.
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.
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L to R: Brenda (2022), Cynthia (2023)
