Hayley Tompkins

A temporary relocation from a domestic studio in suburban Glasgow to the spacious warehouse of The Drawing Room will enable Hayley Tompkins, in her own words, to “build the show from inside out”.Tompkins’ works on paper, sculptural elements and recent film possess a tangential and contentious quality yet their sense of place is definite and unrelenting. Her works are holistic – there appears to be no separation between their physical characteristics, their process of production or, crucially for Tompkins’ practice, their placement. Her collaboration with architect Caruso St John on the café at Spike Island in Bristol demonstrates these concerns most clearly. The individual pieces cannot be divorced from their surroundings or each other. A move to film seems a natural progression for an artist who is trying to create a seamless rhythm – a continuum – from the mind of the artist to the hand that produces the work (and her work is very hand made) to the physical placement within a given space. As Tompkins has said “it is important that the work exists as naturally as possible … nothing should feel too forced… The way things are arranged should feel quite behavioural, as if someone had been there and done that thing”.Like the works on paper, the film hovers between abstraction and representation. It is made primitively, using a hand-held camera, and all shot in close range. Tompkins’ interest is in different realities - the footage combines interior and exterior spaces interspersed with reprographic images – that can be experienced simultaneously.Tompkins is planning a new film which will be made in conjunction with works on paper and a book. During the residency she will explore different forms of looking and seeing with special attention to the presentation of the work so that the viewer can look into the drawings and at the film. As the space between the conditions of producing the work and its placement for exhibition shrinks, the gap between the artist`s sensibility and that of the viewer closes.