Hayley Newman

I came across Hayley Newman’s Covid series of works, in particular those titled Pillows and Lungs (2020). This is a very different aspect of looking at and thinking about the breath to the one I am interested in. But it is a context that is hard to ignore given that we are living through a global pandemic with a virus whose main symptom is to attack the lungs. 

 

The series of works feature ink drawings on watercolour paper of pillows and lung-like forms, produced while the artist was in isolation recovering from Covid-19. I first saw these works via MattFlix, where they were screened as video works with audio of the artists voice reading out a piece of writing titled Pillows. She talks of her experience, thoughts swilling around in her mental and physical space which she is confined to. 

 

What interested me most was the watery and elusive nature of these drawings, especially those of the lungs – ‘pages of adjacent soft cornered, rectangular lozenges with diverse innards. Two on each page.’ The doubles of the lung drawings reminded me of the doubles of Roni Horn. They are sensitively beautiful and delicate marks, but this is mixed up in something deeper and heavier, a physical feeling of weight and weighing down. Something their monochromatic medium plays with too, as dark hard-edged outlines mix with soft pale areas marking out areas of bodily indentation in the pillows or where breath is seeping or clogged in the lungs, ‘they are as entangled as my own breath…myself reproduced drawn.’ 

 

The drawings are very simple, shown on a slideshow moving from one to the next. Newman’s audio then adds a narrative to them. I enjoyed the way she talked about the absent spaces of the body and her appreciation of the pillows. Speaking about the surface of the materials and the body impressions gave me a real sense of the physicality of these objects and how we both make and are made by the spaces around us. 

I especially liked the following sentence: “a cover turned in on itself…cast aside and no longer in use because the body beneath it got up” the sense of the absence of the body here, the trace of doing and now not doing, activation and deactivation. Also, the idea of a pillow being caring, ‘their constant care…dented by my absent head, suffering from exhaustion while the pillow beneath is doing its best to support its bedfellow’ as though they had a living function too. ‘They were a second pair of lungs, external organs, assisting with breathing in return for daily plumping’ she gives the humble pillow such an endearing character. 

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Aside from this series, I feel I have little in common with Newman’s performative and documentary practice. The commonality exists only within this series of works which happens to relate to a very current context and subject surrounding breath.