Reflections

Hayley Tompkins (b. 1971, Leighton Buzzard, England). Through paintings, painted objects and installations, Tompkins invites us into a world where colour, gesture and material come into close company where the everyday becomes charged, and painting proves itself both image and presence.

Tompkins has long made work from an experimental impulse: painting not simply as representation, but as transformation. Her surfaces are soaked, & scarred. Layered fluorescent swaths of colour meet deliberate brushwork, free-form associations sit beside careful interventions. The result is a visual language that moves between the sensual and the structured, the spontaneous and the composed, playful and serious. This duality is central: Tompkins allows painting to be a thinking process, an active engagement with material, time and form.

At the heart of this presentation are works that extend painting into the world of objects. containers, things we sit on, lean into and wear become carriers of colour and texture, reminders of touch, of human scale, of familiarity. Tompkins describes this impulse as a desire “to create a familiar feeling, a commonality, or a way to join with people.” In this way her objects ground the practice in the ordinary, and open space for connection.

Her panel paintings, meanwhile, combine vibrant, often kinetic colour with a gesture that is slightly uneasy, hovering between decision and hesitation. Diluted washes give way to stronger saturation; rhythmic movements are interrupted by stillness and hint at speaking, passing thought, moments of transition. They ask us not only to see the painting, but to feel the moment in which it became.

Together these works reflect Tompkins’s continuing interest in what painting can be: not just surface and colour but object, relation, touch. We are asked not to categorise, but to inhabit, to stand before the work, feel its scale, trace its marks, and respond not through rationalisation but experience.