Rebecca Hastings

'The pursuit of the uncanny, the strange and the unsettling persistently haunt Rebecca Hastings’ paintings. While previous work has revelled in contradiction through candy colours, juicy flesh and unflinching gazes, these recent paintings push and play with new depths of imagination. Hastings has created a world that hums within a stifling atmosphere of hands, fur, fabric and fakery. A palette of warm oxides and deep blue contain her subjects in a field, where it feels hard to draw breath. Through technical skill and command of her materials, she draws us down to where reality is slippery, and narrative elusive.'
Excerpt from catalogue essay by Mary-Jean Richardson 2024

'In contrast to her previous work, which focussed on an internal exploration into maternal ambivalence, this latest body of work is more of an outward focus looking at the anxiety in relation to the state of the planet that our children will inherit. “My early practice was an inwardly focused rumination on maternal ambivalence,” she explains. “But as my children have grown I think of it more broadly as an investigation of the post-human condition, and our anxieties as humans entering a new way of being.'
Excerpt from catalogue essay by Jane Llewllyn 2020