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A used white envelope, torn across the top with blue and green weave drawn on it in ink.
LifeLines (envelopes), Hayley Newman, 2021-present

©the artist

Slade School of Fine Art
University College London
Gower Street
London
WC1E 6BT


Biography

I was born in Guildford, Surrey and received a BA (hons) at Middlesex University before gaining a Higher Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art at the Slade School. In 1995 I took up a DAAD scholarship at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg, after which I was awarded the Stanley Burton research scholarship at the University of Leeds, completing one of the first practice-based PhDs in Fine Art in 2001. I started teaching at the Slade School in 2011.

Research Interests

I am an artist, writer and performer. Over the past decade I have developed ways of working that embrace the written word: sung passages, ekphrastic letters, knitted language, sculpted sentences, sewn messages and expressive typography. Penning, inscribing, marking, doodling and scribbling.

My recent writing is focussed around climate damage, pollution, biodiversity loss and climate and environmental justice. I am particularly invested in epistemic justice and creative projects that imagine and prefigure liveable futures, communal life, and ecological flourishing.

Teaching Summary

I am currently 0.4 Associate Professor of Fine Art and share the role of disability equity advocate in the school.

Exhibitions

Out of the Margins: Performance in London’s institutions 1990s – 2010s
2022 - Whitechapel Gallery

Out of the Margins examines the shifts in institutional engagement with live art, highlighting key moments that raised this cultural practice from underground and marginalised to an acknowledged art form.

Where There’s Space to Grow
2022 - Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens

Where There’s Space to Grow is an exhibition curated by Celebrate Different Collective, a group of young people living in Sunderland, which creatively reflects on the industrial decline of the 1980s in North East England, while looking ahead to a shared progressive future.

Arts Council Collection artworks sit alongside new works created by local Sunderland residents.

Art for Life: An exhibition made with key workers
2021 - Firstsite Gallery Colchester

‘Art for Life’ is the result of a number of workshops with artists and people in frontline roles in the health and care sectors which examined their experiences of the pandemic and the subsequent effects on their lives.

‘Art for Life’ features specially-selected loans from the Arts Council Collection –with whom Firstsite is a National Partner 2019-22 – and a variety of pieces made by the key workers who took part in the workshops alongside NHS art psychotherapists, who generously gave up their time to support the sessions. Also on display are contributions from artists affected by the COVID-19 virus.

Tongue Tied
2019 - Matt's Gallery

Works presented inTongue-tied have been selected from an incidental archive of over 500 drawings, watercolours, texts and knitted textiles made by Hayley Newman since June 2018, all of which trace personal responses to a time of uncertainty and turbulence.

The Aerodrome
2019 - Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Michael Stanley, Curator of Ikon before becoming Director of Milton Keynes Gallery and then Modern Art Oxford, who died tragically in 2012. Co curated with David Austen and George Shaw and structured loosely on Rex Warner’s 1941 wartime novel The Aerodrome, a book that made a great impression on Stanley, it includes many of the artists he worked with, all of whom held him in great affection and regarded him as one of their own.

Free the Pussy!
2018 - Summerhall, Edinburgh

Artist Tamsyn Challenger curates a new exhibition this summer of works of art made in protest to Pussy Riot’s imprisonment by the Russian government in 2012: ‘Free The Pussy’.

Publications

A to B in MK
- Book , Salad Press , London, England 2018/09/16

Festival of Curves, Slopes and Detours
- Performance

mattflix.video: Hayley Newman, Gravity, Gluts, Pennies, Pillows and Ray
- Other