4th December – 17th January 2026

The Lord Mayors Pavilion, Fitzgerald’s Park – Tuesday – Saturday 11am-4pm

Through large scale, performative paintings Hayes investigates the limits of verbal expression and the physical tension that rises when language fails. Her practice is an exploration and representation of intense bodily feeling. Black Gives Way To Blue traces the emotional arc of the body as it moves through waves of grief and emotional upheaval, revealing how these states bubble to the surface, collide, and dissolve within us. Hayes is interested in the moment when internalised experience breaks to the surface.

Her painting strategies play with the intimacy of memory and soundscapes to create a bodily charge that transfers onto the canvas. As this builds, she utilizes this anxious energy, creating fervent marks that leave traces of this happening in their wake. These gestures, immediate and visceral, speak to the raw sensations that accompany loss and the fragile forms of empathy that emerge from it. The nature of Hayes painting process allows her to express feeling and sensation in a search for comfort. 

Concerned with the present moment of self-surveillance, the work is imbued with a sense of interiority and reflection. Black Gives Way To Blue invites viewers to inhabit their own emotional states, to recognize the universality of loss, and to meet one another with a renewed sense of connection. 

Funded and supported by Cork City Council.