Hayley Tompkins

Hayley Tompkins is a visual artist who combines painting with a variety of other forms, including found objects, digital films, photography, and furniture, to create installations. Using acrylic paint, Tompkins creates works which express feelings and sensations rooted in the unconscious, often begun unpremeditatedly and conceived in one sitting. She is concerned with the tension between art’s mimetic quality and its physical reality, with many of her exhibitions combining large gessoed wood panels and canvas works alongside found items such as painted sticks, parts of clothing and furniture. Recent pieces have moved toward a surreal, impressionistic, symbolic representation, with figures, bodies, skies, landscapes, and interior rooms emerging.

Tompkins’ work is free and expressive, defying categorisation and reflecting instead sequences and moods that change unpredictably, in a lifelike way. By extending painting beyond the traditions of canvas, she emphasises spatial relationships and explores the complicated nature of experience and feeling.

Her latest exhibitions include L is for Landscape at Division of Labour, London; On the Thick and Thin of Painting at CrossLane Projects, Kendal; Reflections, Roland Ross, Margate; Surroundings, The Modern Institute, Glasgow; Life Like Looking, Efremidis, Seoul; and Tell Gonzo How, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles.