Bio

Fran Hayes graduated from a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in 2022. Her first solo show ‘Thick, Stretchy, Sticky Space’ was at IMT Gallery, London, from May to July 2024. Fran has exhibited locally and internationally, most recently in collaboration with Ika Schwander for Rooms Festival, Maastricht, The Netherlands in January 2024. She has also organised and curated exhibitions including ‘through the eyes of a pigeon’ (2023) in Cape Town, South Africa, for which she made a collaborative installation with Nick Rushton, and ‘The Way We Were Tenderly’ (2023), London, with Alice Palm.

Other significant exhibitions include: Sluice Lisbon: Territory (2022), a group show in Lima, Peru (2020), and UnFabricated at DContemporary (2021). Fran collaborated with established multimedia artist Maggie Roberts to make the digital work ‘ADA’ whose first iteration has shown at IMT Gallery, GIANT Gallery and the London Art Fair 2022.

Statement

My practice is slippery. I must grip it by its slimy skin. It slithers between realms; real, digital, physical. It plants its seeds across space-time.

My practice is predominantly based in Blender, an open-source 3D modelling software, but expands into writing, sculpture and installation. I create speculative landscapes and immersive environments that explore damaged ecologies, science-fiction and the uncanny through a fundamentally human lens.

The worlds/entities I create aim to reconnect humanity to Earth. The otherworldly subjects of my digital spaces marry with my writing practice which oscillates between visceral descriptions of the landscapes and emotions that I encounter when making the work.

Recent developments have caused me to realise that I practise fictioning (storytelling wearing an artistic and academic hat), and my practice is currently situated in the speculative space I have identified as THICK SPACE. THICK SPACE is everywhere, it stretches to the furthest edges you can imagine, and then crosses to infinity. It is unimaginable, a high-water mark. It constantly evolves.

Blender is my main tool for investigating, exploring and understanding THICK SPACE. In Blender I carve, mould and sculpt digital clay to create systems whose identities are unknown. They are creature, entity, eco-system, world, galaxy, cosmos. Hybrids and alloys. There is no hierarchy, it is neutral.

My practice is intuitive, it spills from my body across dimensions and materials. I am more concerned with play and experimentation than ‘final’ outcomes, and this gives my work an unrestricted energy. Passing a certain level of control over to machine or program changes the way I think about my work. It becomes collaborative, and this is when exciting developments occur.

The infinite space that exists within Blender is the ultimate playground for exploring form, material and texture, and I try to push the program to its experimental and conceptual limits.

My practice is leaky, overflowing into physical spaces. Borrowing, sharing and collaborating is important, if not essential. Art membranes should be porous, two-way streets of information allowing kind and inclusive advancements in all activities and methods that can be shared across fields. It is hard to progress in a closed loop.

Writing has drilled an exciting new depth into my practice. It lets me articulate emotions that I am still learning to express in digital space, while giving me room to reflect on the speculative worldscapes I make. Through writing, I am learning how to solidify the language I need to talk about these spaces and communicate the systems they exist within to human audiences. I use sound as the vessel to present text, but as my practice evolves, I am constantly exploring new modes of exhibiting.