Hayley Tompkins - Far

This book is published to accompany the exhibition Hayley Tompkins: Far at the Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, 22 October 2022 - 29 January 2023. With a new essay from Camila McHugh, an introduction from Fiona Bradley and extensive photography from Ruth Clark, it is both an introduction to and an immersion in Tompkins's visual imagination. Glasgow-based artist Hayley Tompkins has described her process as one of 'trying really to see something'. Turning her gaze on everyday objects both real and reproduced, she uses paint, photography and film to mark them, and mark them out, as objects we might like to look at too. This publication brings together a large body of new paintings - the largest group of paintings on panel Tompkins has made to date - beautiful, complex abstractions exploring the material power of both colour and paint and shown both in blown up detail and in full here. They are joined by some of the painted everyday objects for which Tompkins is best known: paintings on shirts, chairs, mallets, which collapse the conventional distance between a thing and a painting of a thing. Intimate and transgressive, Tompkins's work brings us in touch with the world. Defying obvious categorisation, it plays with the feeling behind the mark and the energy of the art making process.