Sitting in MF Coffee last Monday afternoon, I speak with Hattie Quigley, a final year ECA painting student, whose exhibition at Summerhall, Gorge!, I visited the previous week.
Focusing on themes of femininity and food, Hattie’s installation exuded a kind of tantalising allure. With hypnotic, trance-like music setting the tone of the space, I felt not only absorbed by, but also into her paintings. The expressive, bold brushstrokes had a striking energy, almost as though unrestrained emotion was mixed in with the pigments.
Hattie tells me how her exhibition was about “overstimulation” both in theme and in experience. She wanted “to create a whole world” not just in her work but in the room itself. The exhibition seemed to embody insatiable desire – it was not just a feast for the eyes, but for all the senses.
Sculpted hands were reaching out of the walls as though they were aching to grab something. The collapsed table and chair in the centre of the room with cakes, plates, and wine spilling off had a powerfully disruptive effect as viewers navigated the space around this installation.
Impressively, Gorge! was not Hattie’s first solo exhibition. She has just had an exhibition at the café August 21, down the road from Summerhall – she laughs as she tells me that she just walked her work over.
Hattie recounts her research into Roman Bacchanals, feasts which celebrated the Roman God of Wine Bacchus. Not much was written at the time about these, but initially these celebrations were exclusively for women, which Hattie was intrigued by.
She tells me that the Roman historian Livy, years later, claimed that these excessive feasts demonstrated the untameable nature of femininity and female desire, a notion which is still palpable in society today. “As women it has been sort of drilled into us from quite a young age that we need to have a dainty appetite, we need to not eat a lot”, Hattie explains.
She describes her third-year “epiphany about the male gaze, and what this has done to me growing up and to my friends”. Feeling a “pressing need” to explore this in her work, Hattie takes her personal and social experiences to the canvas – “it is how I digest the world, through my art”.
Confessing to an Instagram deep-dive, I congratulate Hattie on winning the Young Fine Artist Award in the Scottish Portrait Awards in 2023. I ask how it felt to receive this honour, and she replies “mad”. Her award-winning Squeeze 0.1 is a close-up portrait of a woman with a screwed, strained facial expression and eyes tight shut. With force, the sitter crushes a lemon to her mouth, the pulp of which drips across her face. The painting links thematically to the work displayed in Gorge! but there is a noticeable shift in Hattie’s style.
Hattie recalls that as a child, she spent hours watching videos online, focusing on one body part at a time to perfect her technique. Having seen the life-like qualities of her earlier portraits on Instagram, this does not surprise me.
But Hattie reveals that she felt that realist portraiture was more about “people-pleasing” and receiving praise from others than about her own enjoyment and interest. For the raw, pure expression seen in her current body of work, she felt she “needed to break free” from these pressures. Still, she retains “a figurative hook”, as to her “people, bodies and flesh [are] the most visually stimulating”.
So far, Hattie says her experience as a young woman in the art world has been unproblematic, but that being at university can be a sheltered experience for women artists. She is reminded of her friend who said it was only after graduating that “she realised what it meant […] to be a woman doing [art]”. Hattie’s tutor last term also “drilled into us that you need to know what it means to be a woman painting”.
It is with a wide smile that Hattie talks about her time at ECA, where she has been working towards her Painting BA since 2021. Despite the discipline of her course, Gorge! demonstrates Hattie’s ability to play with other mediums and create beyond the brush.
Hattie’s advice to other art students: “Apply to every single thing” and “give it your all!”
It can feel uncomfortable to put yourself out there, she says, but “learning to be rejected is the best thing ever. It’s so sad, but it makes you so thick-skinned.”
I admire Hattie’s wisdom: “Everyone has a different favourite artist and a different favourite style, so it’s actually not personal.” If art is subjective, then so is rejection.
I drop the big, dreaded question, and ask Hattie if she has plans for after she graduates. She’s not sure what life will look like post-university, but she’s keen to have a slower paced year “living as an artist” before potentially doing a Masters.
By the end of the interview and after viewing the exhibition, I found myself drawn into Hattie’s world. She expresses openly and thoughtfully her approach and thinking and I was excited to discover her art and what lies behind it.
You read it here first – you will be hearing a lot more about Hattie Quigley in the future.
Follow @hattiequigley on Instagram, and visit her website at https://www.hattiequigleyart.com/.
Image via Eden Hutton.