Hayley (Ngāti Kawau, Ngāti Tautahi, Ngāpuhi) is a conceptual artist and curator; her own practice primarily works with photography, having graduated with a Master of Visual Arts in 2019 from Dunedin School of Art.

An absurdist by nature Hayley often works in the gigantic or the miniscule, to draw in or give space, or force a particular perspective on the viewer. Hayley’s work focuses on storytelling and layering through allegory and palimpsest. Often using humour to diffuse serious issues found in modern society, she aims to “create dangerously” giving a voice to peoples who are marginalised, fragmented and underrepresented. She uses textual references to then subvert the original meaning of the image through captions or titles. You are left then, with a precise moment in time, not knowing what came before or what is to come after.

She works from the perspective that photography in and of itself is dichotomous in nature, we take photos because of a seemingly hardwired need to be recognised, needed and remembered, but by taking the image we acknowledge that everything is ephemeral and will not be around forever. Regardless of whether a particular image is happy, sad, hilarious, melancholic or anything in between, each image examines themes of presence and absence, loss and longing, and “the missing thing”, regardless of if that missing thing is a person, place, object or memory.