The Blackwater Valley Makers Art Centre, Fermoy is delighted to present Hold Your Breath, a solo exhibition by Irish artist Ava Hayes opening January 20th, 2024. Hold Your Breath features a selection of Hayes’ most recent work from 2022-2023, running from January 20th-February 29th 2024.

Ava Hayes (b.1998) is an Irish artist based in Cork City. She is a recent graduate of the Crawford College of Art & Design. Graduating with a first class MFA her practice is now based out of Cork’s own Sample Studios.

Through large scale, performative paintings and sound based work Hayes explores the limitations of verbal communication and the resulting physical frustration. The work is an exploration and representation of intense bodily feeling.

Hayes is interested in the moment when internalised experience breaks to the surface. Her painting strategies play with the intimacy of memory and soundscapes to create a bodily charge that transfers onto the canvas. As this builds, she utilizes this anxious energy, creating fervent marks that leave traces of this happening in their wake. The immediacy and visceral nature of this painting process allows her to express feeling and sensation in a search for comfort.

Concerned with the present moment of self-surveillance, the work is imbued with a sense of interiority and reflection.