Angela Hayson

A Sydney based artist, Hayson has exhibited in a range of international and national venues. Over the last sixteen year period, she has explored a range of processes including drawing, painting, printmaking and more recently, sculpture.

Hayson establishes her connection to the land with textured layers of shapes and colours inspired by the gnarly scrub and weathered rock formations in the Northern Territory.

This is a harsh climate, at the mercy of the wet and dry seasons, typically hot and humid.  The multiple woodblock technique enables Hayson to overlap a density of textures, colours and shapes that speak of that dusty earth, scrubby eucalypts and stratum of rock forms.  Not only are these indicative of the contemporary time and place but they also resonate with a connection to the ancient, of the spirituality of past lives in that land. 

Hayson’s imagery originated with aspects of the natural world ranging from the collection of small seed pods to the enormous rock structures that surround the landscape of the western Gulf of Carpentaria. Working with a multi-woodblock technique, Hayson superimposes transparent colours over shapes that build up a sense of the ageless, ethereal past.  

Hayson’s work presents intersection of representation and abstraction that is simultaneously immediate and timeless.  As she explains, the immutability of this landscape evokes a resonance with past lives…” my interest has been in the anthropomorphic elements as seen in nature as a metaphor for human connections and communication”.