The Restless World of Hayley Tompkins

When reading about the works of Hayley Tompkins, two words frequently crop up: ‘everyday’ and ‘paint’. Both are, in a sense, self-explanatory. Tompkins’s practice, however, is far from straightforward. The works in ‘Surroundings’, her solo exhibition at The Modern Institute, Glasgow, are tricky in the best way.

On view is a new series of acrylic on gesso panel paintings, along with painted organic and textile found objects that seem frozen in a moment of high energy, as if pinned to the gallery walls for only a fleeting second. These works conjure the space in which you find yourself upon waking from a vivid dream, where everything is almost – but not quite – real. Consider three sticks hung on one of the walls: Stick XXX, XXI, XXIV (all works 2025). The largest is no longer than an arm, the smallest the length of a hand; each is painted in thick oranges, pinks and greens that cut across the stark gallery in hyperchromatic slashes. Positioned just below these is a knotted necktie (Tie): painted in a similarly jarring range of colours, the work dangles from the wall at about the height of someone on their knees, as though some 1980s wedding guest were peering at Tompkins’s exhibition in fascinated disbelief, having dissolved into an uncontrollable world of vibrancy, hedonism and chromaticism.

On the wall opposite hangs a severed shirt cuff, puffed up and covered in a blur of blue paint strokes (Proximity to Love, Cuff VII). Displayed in this way, it suggests an absent hand gesturing towards the panel beside it to say, ‘Look at this painting – can you see it?’ The painting itself is abstract and energetic, seeming to hold the remnants of figures: several fleshy blobs in the lower left corner form silhouettes reminiscent of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Les Grandes Baigneuses (The Large Bathers, 1884–87). Within both the painting and the empty cuff, there is at once a nod to and a rejection of the figure, an invocation of a body that was present an instant ago and then, suddenly, erased.

‘Surroundings’ abounds with jarring colours and thickly layered strokes of paint. There is a quick–quick–slow pacing to Tompkins’s mark-making: small, prodding gestures – fingers, touch, brushstrokes – form a rhythm across the room, stamping out a beat to follow through the gallery. Take, for instance, the painting Transceivers, where some areas feature rapidly applied streaks of paint, while others are more contemplative, worked over, with blocked-out sections of black pigment. Meanwhile, on the back wall, the large acrylic painting Surroundings gives the impression of being pressed up against the window of a house: you can make out shelving units, a plant and some bric-a-brac, but certain elements are omitted, as if your view were obscured by a half-pulled curtain, keeping you out.

The works in ‘Surroundings’ – with their hidden figures, intense colours and frenetic energy – hum with the vitality of this deeply fragmented moment. We seem to be living in a time that makes less and less sense, a half-reality ricocheting between the frighteningly real and the grotesquely abstract. Day to day, many of us witness global atrocities through images on mobile devices. Tompkins invites us into the extended hangover of a dream we once had, where everything is unfixed – a space in which, for a moment, we can relinquish logic. Every so often, we need to venture into Tompkins’s surreal world to return ready to face reality anew.

Hayley Tompkins’s ‘Surroundings’ is on at The Modern Institute, Glasgow, until 29 October

^{Main image: Hayley Tompkins, Surroundings (detail), 2025, acrylic on gesso panel, 1.5 × 1.6 m. Courtesy: the artist and The Modern Institute/ Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow; photograph: Patrick Jameson}