HAROUN HAYWARD

Haroun Hayward joined us on the project in July 2021. During his time with us, Hayward created a series of works in both watercolour and oil. Exploring the visual possibilities of sound, textile traditions, and landscape painting, Hayward’s work straddles the porous boundary between abstraction and representation. Examining how his own sense of self is tied to the domestic realm, he turns his attention to objects, experiences, and memories.

Compositional decisions are inspired by an interest in the histories and rhythms of various styles of music and textile patterns, exploring their deep interconnectedness, and the atmosphere they set. His paintings include rhythm and movement through repetitive or doubled-up patterns and forms, to create a visual tempo. He is especially inspired by the subtle, repetitive, and hypnotic rhythms of electronic music subcultures, which originated in the 80s.

Handmade textiles from South Asia and West Africa continually resurface in Haywood’s work, influencing its textural qualities. In his oil works, Haywood uses paints, bars and pastels to layer and scrape away, creating distinctive texture like that of the woven textiles he is inspired by. Forms are molded and then scored to impart the effect of high relief embroidery. The artist frames each of these works himself with hand-stained wood. For him, framing becomes an important act of coalescing, ultimately, completing the interplay of organic and inorganic form, color, space, shadow, and light.

The works also enter a conversation with art history and are irreverent homages to an eclectic group of abstractionist and landscapist predecessors of both British and South Asian origin- a reflection of his own diverse heritage. Abstract forms inspired by local landscapes sit alongside shapes influenced by Yantras- mystical diagrams from the Tantra tradition, which have symmetrical forms and are painted as aids in meditation. He is interested in the universality of the mystical and otherworldly states of flow achieved through various creative experiences, privately or communally, that help in ascending to a different mental plane.The artist’s work resists boundaries and categorisations and acknowledges the history of subversiveness and resistance that’s inseparable from the history of electronic music, domestic craft, and abstraction.