Ava Hayes: Residency

Ava Hayes is an emerging Irish artist based in Cork City. She graduated from the Crawford College of Art & Design’s MA Art & Process Degree with a first class honours. Through large scale performative paintings Hayes explores the limitations of verbal communication and the resulting physical frustrations. The work is an exploration and representation of intense bodily feeling. Hayes is interested in the moment when internalised experience breaks to the surface. Her painting strategies play with the intimacy of memory and soundscapes to create a bodily charge that transfers onto the canvas. As this builds, she utilizes this anxious energy, creating fervent marks that leave traces of this happening in their wake. The immediacy and visceral nature of this painting process allows her to express feeling and sensation in a search for comfort. Concerned with the present moment of self-surveillance, the work is imbued with a sense of interiority and reflection.

Ava Hayes will have a solo exhibition in December 2025 in The Lord Mayor’s Pavilion. This residency will offer an opportunity to further hone this work and invite the public in to see the process of development.

Triskel Sample Project Space is a new partnership between Triskel and Sample-Studios that will provide a visual arts project space for artists, especially emerging and mid-career artists, to test ideas and to develop new work that can be seen by the public. This offers tangible career development and audience engagement opportunities to artists on their ‘home turf’ where they have a safe space to develop new ideas, within which risk-taking is possible.