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 explored the limitations of verbal communication and the resulting physical frustrations. The work was an exploration and representation of intense bodily feeling. Hayes’ work focused on the moment when internalised experience breaks to the surface. Her painting strategy played with the intimacy of memory and soundscapes to create a bodily charge that transfers onto the canvas. As this built up, she utilized this anxious energy, creating fervent marks that left traces of this happening in their wake. The immediacy and visceral nature of this painting process allowed her to express feeling and sensation in a search for comfort. Concerned with the present moment of self-surveillance, this work was imbued with a sense of interiority and reflection.

Ava Hayes went on to have a solo exhibition in December 2025 in The Lord Mayor’s Pavilion. This residency offered an opportunity to further hone her work from Triskel Sample Project Space and invited the public in to see the process of development.