Mair Hughes United Kingdom

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Mair Hughes creates sculptural installations that centre material practices and ecological narratives, employing a wide variety of media from ceramics and metal-casting to textiles, drawing and photography. Photographic images work alongside crafted and sculptural objects in her installations. Responding to historical sites, Mair's work makes adventurous, playful connections between obscured histories and the contemporary world, exploring ways of reading the landscape through speculative narratives, reimagined artefacts and site-responsive work. Her approach draws from psychogeography, exploring how places make us feel. She combines personal responses with historical enquiry, questioning how we construct our identities through objects, sites and memory.

Mair's practice includes research projects, collaborations and residencies. Exhibitions include 'Strange Lands Still Bear Common Ground' at Tulca Festival in Galway, November 2025 and ‘Earth Magic’ at Museum in the Park in Stroud, also in November 2025. In 2023, Hughes exhibited a series of installation works as part of ‘Into the Distance’ at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, and has work held in their collection. Over the past five years she has been involved in a series of exhibitions and projects exploring ecological themes, including ‘Plant Communitas’ (The Rodd, Sidney Nolan Trust Gallery, Presteigne, 2023), ‘Material Flow’ (Museum in the Park Stroud, 2021), ‘Severn Worlding’ (Stroud Valley Artspace, 2022). and ‘Incendiary’ (Pound Arts, Corsham, 2020). Hughes also co-led the ‘Utopian Realism’ project which looked at how radical ideas are often tested in rural places, and was funded by the Arts Council of England and Arts Council Wales.

Mair's project ‘The Borderlands/Y Gororau’ was commissioned for Tulca Festival 2025 in Ireland. The project explored the potency and plurality of borderland landscapes and dual identities, drawing from site explorations in the Welsh borderlands, archive research, family history, personal reflection and collaboration with other artists.