Hayley Megan French

‘Different paths I have taken that remind me where I am’

16 January - 4 March 2021

Different paths I have taken that remind me where I am presents 13 new abstract paintings of walking paths near my home in Old Guildford, Sydney. These are paths I walk or drive often and through this repetition they have become embedded with memories and associations that remind me where and who I am. Roads, intersections and footpaths are overpainted, highlighting the path I have walked like a suburban desire line. 

The process of walking to understand where I am has been an important part of my process for the past few years, in particular for my ongoing project: The Pipeline documenting three suburbs through overpainted Polaroids. These canvases record this walking process and the remembering that takes place at home in my studio. With the need to stay close to home in 2020, these works have been an attempt to orient myself by physically and imaginatively circling home. 

Layers of place – a reflection on the paintings of Hayley Megan French

By Nadia Odlum

The paintings in this exhibition come from walking.

Home for Hayley Megan French is in Guildford, on Bidjigal land in Western Sydney. Like most of us in 2020, Hayley

was restricted in her movement, spending more time walking the streets close to her home, sometimes with a goal

but also aimlessly, the type of walk where the mind wanders as much as the body. Hayley realised she was

unconsciously circling her own home, creating a map of the local area in her mind in relation to the house. Returning

to the centre, the studio, she engaged in a parallel process of recalling and painting, translating embodied

experience to the canvas.

When we walk, there is always more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear. Experiences accumulate, and

every layer we add is influenced by the ones that came before.

The more we walk the same paths, through the same landscapes, the deeper this layering occurs, until places

themselves come to impact the very fabric of how we see the world.

In Hayley’s works, layers of white paint are built up on dark backgrounds, creating a sense of peering through

multiple veils. Shadows of lines that have been painted and then obscured form muted compositional anchors, while

a restricted palette of bolder lines reveal to us which paths were the focus of the artists’ recollections. Walking,

remembering and painting all intermingle in the process. When I visited her home studio the paintings were

arranged around the room, some completed, some in progress, many still wet with paint. They circled us like Hayley

herself had circled the house, forming portals between the world and its memory.

The soft uneven lines in the paintings are like ‘desire lines’, the unofficial tracks of worn grass or dirt that appear in

suburban parks as the result of many people taking the same route, each footstep contributing to the cumulative

mark. As the body leaves its trace upon the world, so too we leave traces upon each other, guiding and being guided

in measure by those who we live close to, who also seek to call a place home.

The suburb of Guildford is recorded in these works from a number of perspectives. In the works bearing the title

Three lines three horizons, the artist recreates the gaze of someone standing at street level. The stacked lines depict

the street, the houses, and the latent horizon. In other works, such as Half a lap of Springfield Park, the abstraction

adopts a top down view, like a diagrammatic map scribbled on a napkin. The artist is examining her experience of

this place from all angles, a process as physical as walking itself.

Through contemplative abstraction these works communicate what it is to spend time in a place, and to allow that

place to layer itself within you. A slow approach to landscape, they give form to the intimate intertwining of the

body and the world.

Floorsheet and Essay