Ava Haggas

Painting | Drawing

BIO

Ava Haggas (b. 1998) graduated Camberwell College of Arts 2020 in Fine Art Photography. Haggas also holds an Art & Design Foundation from City & Guilds of London Art School (2017), has completed a Digital Textile Design Course at Central St Martins (2020) and the Intensive Drawing Term at The Royal Drawing School (2021). She lives and works in West London.

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Haggas has exhibited extensively in London and Bristol in group exhibitions with galleries and in light of her study recognition since 2019. Including exhibitions at CGP Gallery; Copeland Gallery; APT Gallery; Hoxton 253; AMP Gallery; Purslane; in digital exhibition series installment Works on Paper 4 with Blue Shop Cottage; BWG Gallery and That Art Gallery. Her first solo exhibition Natural Intermissions will launch July 2023 with BWG Gallery.

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Haggas’ work is held in many private collections in the UK and internationally, and also has a number of pieces in the Nixon collection.
 

STATEMENT

“My practice consists of drawing vibrant, intricate scenes that turn depictions of nature into otherworldly landscapes. I am most interested in pattern and colour. Of course the idea of what is beautiful is regularly thought to be superficial, but I think there is something very powerful and intuitive about the connection we have to things that are beautiful. For me (and most people) this often resides in nature, and so my work has instinctively taken on this theme. I think that there’s something incredible about the fact that an arrangement of colours and shapes can trigger a sense of pleasure or calmness within me. This feeling of content is what I search for when making work. I am a habitual artist and part of my practice is to remind myself to break out of the patterns that I fall into, to experiment and work through things that don’t make sense until they do. It’s a battle with muscle memory. I like to refer to a place that I have been to and transform the memory into a place of its own. With drawing you can exaggerate or minimise information capturing the essence of a place, which I find it to be quite a poetic process. When I photograph things I often find the result to be a romanticised version of reality, and when I draw from a photograph it becomes romanticised once over. The result is more of an imaginary world, it’s a bit of escapism.

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I often want my work to create a sense of awe. One of my favourite things about looking at art is to wonder at the details, to see the image as a whole and then to fall into its smaller parts. My work contains details within details. This time-consuming process is what I find to be so gratifying about drawing. Through a repetitious process that requires effort and patience, I feel like I’m putting a piece of myself into the work. The time-consuming nature of this is laborious yet satisfying; it becomes therapeutic and hypnotising, which is ultimately what I want my work to be.”