Featured artist: Hayley Mills-Styles

Hayley Mills-Styles is a Yorkshire based artist working with embroidery in her little home studio in Leeds. Using fabric and thread, she creates textile drawings and objects that tell stories. These stories often have an autobiographical theme, exploring mental health and childhood memories. The common theme that runs throughout her practice is memory; creating stories about her own experiences that engage the viewer.

"My work has been exhibited in museums and heritage sites throughout the north including Whitby Museum, Sunny Bank Mills and the Thackray Medical Museum, where I created site specific installations that explore museum and heritage collections, allowing audiences to explore the history of objects in an innovative way. In 2015, I began recording my own experiences of mental health using embroidery and found objects. Going Sane? An Archive was commissioned by Hoot Creative Arts in Huddersfield to open up conversations around metal health and wellbeing. I received such a positive response from the exhibited works which was really heart-warming.

Identity is a recurring theme in my practice, looking at my own experiences of not only mental health but the people and places who have made an impact on my life and work. In 2018, I worked with Whitby Museum to create a textile autobiography inspired by the objects in their extensive collection. I’ve also created site responsive work for the Thackray Medical Museum and Sunnybank Mills which included embroideries and soft sculptures.

I work predominantly in textiles, using a range of traditional techniques like hand embroidery, appliqué and English Patchwork. I combine these techniques with digitally embroidered drawings using my Pfaff Creative 3.0 sewing and embroidery machine. Using the Pfaff and the associated software allows me to transform my drawings and photographs into stitch, deconstructing the layers to produce abstract images. Prior to my Masters in Textiles, I’d always worked with hand embroidery. Digitising part of the making has helped me to step back from the decision making process, letting the software select colours and scale of a piece.

I’m currently working on a few different collections of work inspired by heritage collections, the urban landscape and personal narratives under the banner, Flock North. Flock North is a collaborative project, exploring textile production and migration in Yorkshire. Our research has been based on items from Leeds Museums and Galleries and Sunnybank Mills Archive.

As my practice is often site responsive, I’ve found that during lock down I’m looking at things differently. My days are usually filled with teaching and meetings so it feels self-indulgent to spend my days embroidering without outside pressures. I’ve picked up books and samples from my studio shelves that I haven’t looked at for months. I’ve found myself observing my immediate surroundings in more detail, exploring surface and pattern. When my friend started sending us images from his daily exercise, I was inspired to start recording what have become known as authorised perambulations. I’m using the Strava app to record our routes which are translated into stitched pieces using hand embroidery and vintage textiles."

You can find Hayley on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram or on her website. She also has a shop on Big Cartel where you can buy her work directly. 

CuratorSpace are currently featuring articles by artists, curators and organisations who want to share their experiences of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, whether that is artists using their practice as a way of exploring new boundaries of isolation, or as a way to connect more broadly with their communities. We are also interested in hearing from curators and organisations who are offering support to artists.

Contact us at louise@curatorspace.com to share your story. 
 

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