Hattie Malcomson graduated with a painting degree from the University of Brighton in 2020. The central subject of Hattie's practice is the process of womens empowerment within the context of contemporary society - exploring themes of women's sexuality, beauty standards, sex work, and loneliness. Her larger than life paintings demand your attention. The flamboyant forms and awkward posturing of her figures upend any notion of so-called ‘good taste’, and all the patriarchal beauty norms included within it. Malcolmson is interested in eliciting reactions, whether humour or repulsion, through careful attention to the ways the paint can be manipulated. As such, her figures are made up in heavy impasto oil – like a full-face of makeup – over flat acrylic backgrounds, creating unnerving juxtapositions.
Hattie’s lino prints, sharp lines and harsh colours on a plain white background, illustrate the power and potential of two-tone pieces for capturing thematic and definitive emotion. A lexicon of stylised images, Hattie showcases her gift for abstracting and reducing the human form to ‘bare essentials’ or necessities. However, this simplification of the human body is far from reductive, rather it showcases how an idea or statement can still be realised even if we are faced with just a small embryonic representation. Even in her more raw pieces, we find that these works are far from one-sided, rather they simply invite a greater level of reflection.