STATEMENT OF WORK

Hatty Buchanan harnesses textiles' close relationship with the body and memory to give voice to stories of personal and collective trauma and its aftermath, as well as to suggest the recuperative potential of working with fabric and thread. 

Hatty regularly chooses to work with objects symbolically associated with gender. Incorporating personal items of clothing, fabric objects from her childhood or vintage textiles traditionally used in the home, her material choices recall an intimacy with the body and a proximity to the domestic space. Bearing traces of the past, she uses the material of cloth, and it’s metaphoric potential,  to account for a whole range of human experience: to pictorialise or suggest pain, violence, physical deterioration, rupture and repair. 

Through the act of unmaking and remaking, familiar objects are systematically diverted from their original functions and frames of references into alternative contexts of meaning as moments are told, untold and retold.

Hatty 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.  Her work is an affirmative sabotage of the traditional language of formal abstraction, exploring ways to revitalise it through material innovations and editorial acts of resistance. 

Her ecclectic choice of source material, art historical references, stained clothing, fragments of language and mnemonic symbols, when taken together, establish a deeply personal and confessional constellation of her lived experience.