Hattie Quigley

Artist Statment

Hattie Quigley is a visual artist whose practice consists of oil paintings and sculpture. Exploring the relationship between femininity, food and female desire, her work poses the question of what it means to be a hungry woman in contemporary society.
Revelling in the deliciousness of being ‘too much’, she explores gluttony, excess and indulgence. She immerses the viewer in the visceral pleasure of her painted world; one where women gorge and feast, lose inhibition, and reject the notion that physical attractiveness should be a baseline before you can start to live. The buttery, deliciousness of paint, flesh and food are bound together in emotional, pulsing marks that dance around the histories and language of painting. Drawing inspiration from anything between mythical feasts and the baroque period to pop culture and binge drinking; a hedonistic bacchanal takes place within the paint. Through a lens of overstimulation and excess, she explores women’s individual experience and the political and social meanings of body, of food, of thinness today. In the current climate of right-wing conservatism and weight loss jabs, it is even more political to talk about women who are unashamedly insatiable. The works celebrate bodies in all their forms while examining the tension between extravagance and restraint that we all adhere to be accepted by society. Not only does food speak of erotic desire, power, obsession, fear, it deals with capitalism and consumerism; the gluttony of the world, dancing around what painting is in it’s very essence.