Ava Hayes

Artist Bio

Ava Hayes is an Irish artist based in Cork City. She graduated from the Crawford College of Art & Design’s MA Art & Process Degree with first-class honours in 2022 and has since exhibited across Ireland, the UK, and Europe. Hayes also maintains a national and international curatorial practice, developing projects that extend her research into performance, spatial experience, process-led practices, and contemporary visual culture. Since completing her studies, Hayes has received several significant accolades, including the Sample Studios Graduate Curatorial Residency and the MTU Arts Office Residency. In 2023, she was also awarded the MTU Purchase Prize. In 2025, Hayes completed an international residency exchange in San Francisco as well as a residency at The Triskel Arts Centre, both undertaken in preparation for her second solo exhibition, Black Gives Way to Blue, with Sample Studios at the Lord Mayor’s Pavilion. Based at Sample Studios in Churchfield, Hayes creates performative paintings that explore the limitations of verbal communication and the physical tensions that emerge when language fails.

Artist Statement

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.

Membership: Backwater Artists Network