FRAN HAYES

My practice is slippery. I must grip it by its slimy skin. It slithers between realms. Real. Digital. Physical. It plants its seeds across spacetime.

My practice is interdisciplinary. I work across digital technologies and feminine craft to build immersive installations, video and activist tools. My research spans damaged ecologies, science-fictional imaginaries, and social injustice, most recently focussing on the indiscriminate harvesting of biometric data through invasive, nonconsensual facial recognition technologies.

I am interested in cross-platform making, the relationships that happen between processes and the mutations that exist within those spaces. Whether these platforms are different softwares or physical materials, I find and explore the unexpected breakages that happen here. My recent project, SLIME CITY, works from this idea. By developing workflows between 3D scanning, bacterial algorithms, digital modelling and printing, I built a functioning pipeline for a wearable mask that hides the wearer from surveillance AI, utilising the mutations within the generative growing process as an essential aspect of the design.

My research is grounded in interdisciplinary practice and community engagement. I am currently running 3D scanning and Blender workshops for the British Museum's Young People's Digital Art Cohort, using worldbuilding as a springboard to bring the museum's artefacts into digital landscapes. This project reignited my interest in bridging digital and physical spaces, using open-source software to make complex technological processes more accessible and breaching questions about who gets to shape our visual and material culture.

I want my work to give people technological agency: a clearer view of the systems shaping our lives, and some means of resisting them. Artists have a responsibility to understand the stories of the technologies and materials they use. My crochet practice is where this comes together most clearly. Crochet is radically feminine through its embedded history, a tactile, communal counterpart to my digital work that grounds it and makes it legible to audiences less familiar with technology. Through material research in yarn, I am increasingly interested in the overlaps where craft and computation meet.

EDUCATION

2025 - Present
Goldsmiths University, London
MA Computational Arts

2018 – 2022
Central Saint Martins
BA (Hons) Fine Art (3D Pathway), First Class

2020 – 2021
Central Saint Martins
Diploma in Professional Studies

2017 – 2018
Central Saint Martins
Foundation Diploma in Art and Design (Fine Art Pathway)