About

Artist Biography: 

Hattie Quigley (b.2002) is a contemporary British Artist living and working in Edinburgh, Scotland.

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Artist Statement:

My artistic practice consists of large scale, energetic and highly saturated oil paintings, as well as sculpture and installation. Exploring the relationship between femininity, food and female desire, my work poses the question of what it means to be a hungry woman in contemporary society. Through a maximalist painting approach - paint, flesh and food are bound together in order to get back to a more rich and buttery quality of life, in contrast to the surface-level images that flood our digital modernity. Delicious marks dance around themes of pleasure, indulgence and anarchy, drawing from and engaging with the language and histories of painting. References to Ruben’s, the Dutch Golden Age or Marie Antoinette come into focus the longer the viewer looks, treated with the same hand as social media and pop culture images. 

Through my lens of overstimulation and excess, I want to explore women’s individual experience and the political and social meanings of body, of food, of thinness; in the current climate of a westernised, digitally enhanced aesthetic. 

I create an expansive reality where women gorge at hedonistic feasts, embracing appetite and indulgence, rejecting the notion that physical attractiveness should be a baseline before you can start to live. 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.