About

Bio

Hattie Quigley is a visual artist whose practice consists of large scale, energetic and highly saturated oil paintings. Originating from Brighton and now residing in Edinburgh, Hattie received a first class BA(Hons) Painting Degree at Edinburgh College of Art in 2025 is currently Artist in Residence at Loretto Boarding School in Edinburgh, where she balances her own studio practice with mentoring young artists. Recent and upcoming projects include a solo exhibition at Summerhall Arts, Edinburgh (March 2025); 3 Edinburgh Girls, a group show with Refusé in Fitzrovia, London (October 2025); and participation in RBA Rising Stars (May 2025, Mayfair). She was awarded the JM Finn Graduate Artist Award at the Affordable Art Fair 2025 and named an industry judge winner for Fine Art in the Global Creative Graduate Showcase 2025, in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture.

Artist statement

My artistic practice is interested in extremes. Large-scale paintings act as containers for emotion —feminine desire, hunger, grief, euphoria. Beginning with abstract pours, strokes and smears, figures emerge and dissolve within turbulent scenes of intimacy and excess, their bodies caught between celebration and collapse. These are places where pleasure is not tamed, where women and other bodies push against the narrow confines of acceptability, claiming the right to feel, want, gorge, and live without apology. Through my lens of overstimulation and excess, I want to explore women’s individual experience and the political and social meanings of body, of food, of thinness; in the current climate of right-wing conservatism that continues to be hell bent on wanting women to be as small as possible. The paintings are a celebration of bodies in all their forms while examining the tension between extravagance and restraint that we all adhere to be accepted by society.

The buttery, deliciousness of paint, flesh and food are bound together in emotional, pulsing marks that dance around the histories and language of painting - from the Baroque to Abstract Expressionism and pop culture. I explore what it means to be a hungry woman in contemporary society - how feminine desire is shaped: the ways it is marketed, policed, commodified, yet still erupts in forms that resist containment. Food is a common thread through which I explore wider themes of gender, erotic desire, power, capitalism, and consumerism — all dancing around what painting is in its very essence. I see painting as my way of digesting the lived experience and insisting on, now more importantly than ever, the material richness of the body.