Ava Hayes is an emerging Irish artist based in Cork City. Through large scale performative paintings Hayes explores the limitations of verbal communication and the resulting physical frustrations. 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.