For our latest collaboration, we had the pleasure of meeting up with artist and performer, Hayley Paterson, in a secluded venue on a winter’s night in Brighton city centre! To add to the rawness and vulnerability of our conversation about body image, the artist’s creative process and her most noteworthy projects to date, Hayley bravely volunteered to bare all and was naked for the duration of our discussion – and we’re proud to present a selection of these exclusive candid images across both halves of this special write-up.
Britain Uncovered: Hi Hayley! Thank you for joining us today, and we’re very excited to learn all about your art and perspectives on body image. To start with, we’d love to find out more about your beginnings as an artist. How and when did it all get started – was there a specific moment that helped spark this to life? And can you provide us with an overview of your art practice as it stands today and what you’re currently studying?
Hayley: Hi, thanks so much for having me. I have been doing this for around five years now. It started initially as an outlet for me and acted as a kind of therapy. I was at a point in my life where I needed to reclaim my own identity and learn more about myself. My paintings and use of colour helped me to gain more understanding of my own emotions and as my practise has progressed, it’s become more of a process of reconstructing my subconscious through paint. I do work in other mediums such as photography and film too.
Art has helped me to find my voice, and currently my work feels very contemporary, feminist, and dances the line between the personal and universal. I’m now in my final year of studying fine art painting at Brighton University and I have been working mostly on the collaboration of paint and performance in my work.
BU: Included within your portfolio are some incredibly beautiful and inspiring depictions of the female form. What would you say is your motivation and objective for creating these types of works?
Hayley: I just feel so connected to exploring the female form. The male form does not inspire me, but women create everything. Everything’s born from a woman – they’re the most powerful source for creation. We birth everything from life to ideas, to the men who think they ‘rule the world’. There’s just something so innately powerful about women.
I just think that the cosmic relationship to what it is to be a woman, and sisterhood, divinity, and their relationship to nature, is all interwoven in such a magical way – and I just want to champion how fierce, powerful, passionate and beautiful it feels to be a woman, and to explore femininity. That’s the driving force behind it.
BU: One of your recent projects that caught our eye towards the end of last year was a photo series titled Honey, you kill me, in which you’re pictured sat alongside a skeleton in a rather vulnerable and surreal set of images. How did this concept come about, and what can you tell us about this project?
Hayley: The concept just popped into my head, I can’t lie! I think I was intrigued by the relationship between the abject and intimacy, and how I could influence that. I just wanted to make people uncomfortable.
BU: So it was essentially challenging people to think about the body and life in a different way? With the skeleton representing mortality, perhaps?
Hayley: I guess, yes. I think the mortality of love and obsession, and how it creates questions about me as a subject, and why there is a skeleton, and what the story is behind that. And I wanted it to be a bit fucked up! I wanted people to question why this psycho is trying to kiss a skeleton!
It’s quite a long series too. I wanted it to feel like, “Who knows how long he’s been there?” Along with interactions like, “Hey honey, how was your day”? It’s about that idea of letting go as an active choice. I just think, I’ve looked at the divine aspects of the body. I’ve looked at the spiritual side of it, and I just wanted to make a series that really highlights how nothing truly lasts except change of state. But love can linger, even in the death of something. It’s a deeply human experience to love and let go of that.
BU: What kind of reactions have you received to the Honey, you kill me project thus far?
Hayley: I’ve had a lot of reactions! It’s probably been the most successful shoot I’ve done. I think it’s just because it’s a bit ‘out there’. People have loved it! They’ve laughed, they’ve thought it was hilarious, and they’ve asked me how I could keep a straight face. I didn’t – I was laughing my head off! But it just felt like my feet weren’t really touching the ground with it, and I was leaning into that. And I think that’s where I need to be with my art, and what I want to do more of.
BU: Do you think people aren’t really expecting this type of work from you maybe? Is there an element of shock or surprise to it, perhaps?
Hayley: Well everyone thinks I’m a painter, and I’m not. I don’t really have one interest – I’m an artist. I think I’m a performer. I realise concepts into a performance, and I do a lot of the thinking before any of the art takes place. It’s like a ritual, I guess. It just happens, and I perform it. It’s an interesting one, but wherever the inspiration comes, the visual and the vision I have is so strong. And if it doesn’t fit into a box I’ve been working in, then I’ll figure out which one it can. So I don’t like limiting myself.
BU: Although the sight of flesh shouldn’t really be shocking or taboo in this day and age, I still think people can be surprised merely by the sight of the human body, at times. Was this perhaps another contributing factor to the project receiving so much feedback?
Hayley: People are so desensitised to the body, and to women’s bodies especially.
But they’ve also objectified them to such a degree that it’s kind of dehumanising. So when you take hold of that narrative, and decentre the male gaze and do these shots or photo series, you step into the narrative of personifying a nude, and you become an individual again, and your flesh is your flesh, rather than a subject.
And I think it’s that human quality that unnerves people. That’s what it is. It’s the identity behind the flesh that I think is lost a lot of the time on social media, and that’s why I created a narrative for that series. Because I wanted there to be a strong identity and a strong role, I guess.
I think when something is so well established, in such a desensitised way, you can regain power by manipulating that. I enjoy that.
BU: And it’s good that people are reacting, even if it’s not necessarily in the way you’d wanted or intended – because it then opens the door to that conversation.
Hayley: I don’t ever want a specific reaction. I just want people to react. It’s open to interpretation, because for me, I make it for my own motivations. I’m intrigued to see how people respond to it, but the motivation is working to challenge that, and as I said previously, to challenge the existing notions of how flesh is seen. But that’s where the work is born from, that’s not where it ends up. People just react to it in different ways.
And I think I always feel like I’m on to more interesting things when people take so many different things from my work. I’m trying to avoid telling people how to feel.
It’s like this piece I did recently; a painting called Stop fucking your friends. I put it in a critique, and I didn’t tell anyone what it was called until the very end, and the interpretations were really amusing! And really, based on the energy of the work, and the flow and ways the colours bled together, it was so far beyond what it was born from, which I really enjoyed.
I am very much just playing at life and art, and that’s what I love to do. People grow, and I grow very rapidly and in very different ways, and so my art needs to keep up with that, because obviously my practice is autobiographical. It’s based on me, it’s based on my identity and my experiences; and the ways I’m constantly rapidly evolving, so my art does too. So, my only goal is to reflect where I’m at, and that doesn’t stay the same for long.
BU: Back in 2023 you shared a project named Primal, in which you were naked on a canvas covered in body paints. What can you tell us about this work, and how do you reflect on it several years later?
Hayley: Primal was something I created during my first year at university. I was exploring for a whole year, looking at performance and painting, and how I can combine the two. And I really view my body as the vessel for everything I do. You can’t make a painting without having a body to do that, right? And I’ve always been really interested by movement as well, so I was looking at how to explore how many marks I could make just by using my body as the brush.
It was fun, and it was a big scale, and I felt like I scratched the surface of something I’m probably going to delve into deeper a bit more – but I couldn’t facilitate the vision I had at the time, because I just wasn’t comfortable enough. I think I’d need my own studio space. I think I’d need a self-contained environment, because there were just too many aspects that took me out of my own head. When I’m painting, I need to be in a flow where I’m not really aware of anything that’s going on, and I can just be in that space of creating. But I was so concerned that someone might walk in.
The concept that was born was really fun, and I felt really like myself. There were so many possibilities with it as well, because I was looking at how colour could be produced, and that sense of imprinting – I looked so heavily at palaeolithic art and cave paintings, and that primal need to imprint and be like, “Okay, I’m alive, I’m a human being”. I need that sort of mirror, that reflection of why I am alive. For me, that’s what painting facilitates. That’s why I’ve called my whole art practice ‘Divine Bodhi’, because it’s that call to enlightenment and understanding of consciousness and identity. Which is what I’m actually basing my dissertation on as well.
BU: How was this project perceived by your tutors at the time – did they appreciate it, or was it not necessarily what they were looking for?
Hayley: I don’t think anything I’ve made has been what they’re looking for so far! But I think I’m okay with that now. Performance art is not championed in the university field right now maybe, but they said that if that’s where I’m going, then I need to be at the forefront of the movement. So I need to understand all of the history behind it. And I thought that was a bit pretentious, because inspiration comes wherever it comes.
I have looked into it, and discovered Yves Klein and Carolee Schneemann, and all of the female artists from the 1970s that were overlooked and not credited the way that they should have been, and I felt that I resonated with that experience! But it did shake my confidence a bit. I thought, “This is going to be something I approach where I’m just following my own voice with it”. And I had too many voices with too many opinions on it, and it just took me out of myself. I just felt too directed, and I don’t really respond to that. I make my best art when I’m trying to prove myself against all of the rejection or opinions, or people saying, “Why can’t you just make pretty things”? That’s not why I’m doing this.
BU: And do those expectations almost feel like that patriarchy’s expectations in some ways? If you have a male tutor basically telling you how you should perform and be creative, I can imagine that can feel incredibly stifling.
Hayley: Exactly, 100%. Which is why I binned that project, or decided I wouldn’t do it for now, because I thought, “You know what, I didn’t come here to be told what to do by a man.” And I couldn’t see at that point how to push it forward in a way that truly resonated with me.
I think I needed the last couple of years to be more sure of myself and to follow my own instincts. That’s what uni has taught me the most. They can advise me, and obviously they are hugely respected in their fields, but no one’s doing this type of art in the painting department. So I take everything with a pinch of salt. And it feels fun and exciting to be in completely unfamiliar territory with what I’m doing. But I have to say, some of the advice I have received from my tutors has been of immeasurable help to grow and challenge myself.
BU: What would you consider to be some of your other favourite works to date?
Hayley: I did a series in college called Internal Monologues where I put myself in different environments and noted down my stream of consciousness, pairing them with film clips from those settings. That was a lot of fun. Also, during my first year of uni, whilst I was exploring nude performance painting, I made two paintings called Aura and Emanating Pain. To me, those pieces feel so alive. I felt I really captured my intensity and desire to prove that I can imprint my spirit through my body. So, they are very special to me for that reason.
BU: As we bring the first half of our conversation close, can we end up by asking what you have up your sleeve next, as far as your artistic endeavours are concerned? Is there anything you’re able to share with us, or work that’s in the planning stages maybe?
Hayley: I’m working on a body of work based on lessons in my twenties. So there’s a series of paintings, and I’m incorporating sequences of choreography that I’ll be projecting onto paintings. There’s going to be a lot of film movement, which I have dabbled in previously, but my body’s going to take the centre with these alternative elements. It’s just that rawness that I’m really motivated by. I want a full spectrum of emotion. I want that complete wall down. I like shocking viewers, and I don’t want to have anything off the table.
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- In part two of our interview with Hayley, we'll be shifting gears and turning our attention to the artist's attitudes and perspectives towards body image. We're also discussing societal attitudes towards nudity, Hayley's participation in Brighton Pride, the significance of her body art, and lots more about her ongoing work as an artist. We will also present a further selection of images from our photoshoot, which were captured candidly in our studio space throughout the evening whilst our interview was taking place. Stay tuned for part two coming up in March!
Hayley Paterson is an artist currently studying at the University of Brighton. To see more of Hayley's artwork and to enquire about commissions, follow the artist on Instagram at her @divinebodhiart page.
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