Bio

Fran Hayes is an interdisciplinary artist working across 3D modelling & animation, installation, writing and sculpture. Her first solo show ‘Thick, Stretchy, Sticky Space’ was at IMT Gallery, London, from May to July 2024. Fran has exhibited locally and internationally, most recently in Itoshima, Japan, March 2025 while on residency at Studio Kura. Other significant exhibitions include a collaborative performance installation with Ika Schwander for Rooms Festival, Maastricht, The Netherlands, ‘through the eyes of a pigeon’ (2023) in Cape Town, South Africa, which she curated as well as exhibited in with Nick Rushton, and ‘The Way We Were Tenderly’ (2023), London, with Alice Palm.

Other significant exhibitions include: Sluice Lisbon: Territory (2022), a group show in Lima, Peru (2020), and UnFabricated at DContemporary (2021). Fran collaborated with established multimedia artist Maggie Roberts to make the digital work ‘ADA’ whose first iteration has shown at IMT Gallery, GIANT Gallery and the London Art Fair 2022.

Statement

My practice is slippery. I must grip it by its slimy skin. It slithers between realms; real, digital, physical. It plants its seeds across space-time.

Predominantly based in Blender, an open-source 3D modelling software - and expanding into video, writing and installation - I create speculative landscapes and immersive environments that explore damaged ecologies, science-fiction and the uncanny through a fundamentally human lens.

I carve, mould, sculpt and texture digital clay to create systems whose identities are metamorphic. They slip between creature, entity, eco-system, world, galaxy, cosmos.

I use writing build these amorphous entities a home. My text work is a means of processing, reflection. It oscillates between descriptions of these 3d environments and personal reflections on myself and the world around me - human stuff. Writing allows me to weave narratives that connect myself to these alien spaces.

Through installation building I situate the digital within the physical, inviting viewers to engage with the work directly. I love using and manipulating materials. Through bringing analogue elements into my heavily digital practice I ground myself in the real, tying together the speculative and the tangible.

My practice is leaky, it overflows into physical space where I borrow, share and collaborate with artists and other practitioners. For me, collaboration is essential; art membranes should be porous, inviting a transcending of art spaces to make the world a kinder, more liveable place.