Art has the power to touch people's lives and make a difference’

Steph Hayes

I'm a mixed media artist based in Stoke-On-Trent, working across various mediums to explore the human experience through lived reality and phenomenological practice. My work examines memory, emotion, and the parts of life we struggle to articulate. I create art that asks people to pause and reflect on their own experiences and connections to others.

Recently, my focus has shifted to the social expectations placed on women, particularly around motherhood. Drawing from my own lived experience, I explore maternal ambivalence - the complex, contradictory feelings that exist beneath the surface but rarely get acknowledged openly. My work gives form to what's often unsaid: the struggle, the guilt, the love mixed with loss of self. These emotionally charged pieces challenge the sanitized narrative of motherhood that society presents, instead revealing the raw, unseen reality that many experience but few discuss. I hope my work creates space for honesty and recognition - where others can see their own unspoken truths reflected back and feel less alone in the complexity of their experience.

Artist Statement

My practice is grounded in physical, process-based experimentation. I work directly with my body, materials, and environment, allowing ideas to emerge through action rather than pre-determined outcomes. Movement, repetition, and embodied gestures form the starting point of my research, and I use performance, photography, video, and sculptural processes to trace how the body interacts with the world around it. I am particularly interested in how materials carry emotional or sensory charge—how fabric, light, shadow, text, and found objects can hold memory, tension, or transformation. By cutting, sewing, assembling, projecting, or manipulating these materials, I explore how lived experience becomes visible through its physical marks and residues. The process itself becomes a form of thinking: meanings surface gradually through making, testing, failing, and reworking.

My Art Process

Performance art in web

Across all media, my work aims to translate emotional and psychological experiences into tangible visual forms. I am drawn to processes that reveal instability, change, and the traces left behind by touch, movement, and time. Rather than presenting polished resolutions, my practice embraces the messy, imperfect, and transformative qualities of making. Ultimately, my strategy is iterative and exploratory. Each experiment leads to the next, shaped by curiosity, reflection, and a willingness to let materials guide the work. Through this approach, I seek to create spaces where the physical and the emotional meet—and where the act of making becomes a means of understanding.

Contact me

Feel free to get in touch with me.