Lara Hailey is a multidisciplinary artist working with textiles, sculpture and installation, based in Hastings, East Sussex. Her practice uses deliberately slow, labour intensive processes as a cathartic and political act to explore themes of love, loss, resilience and trauma. Her work draws on personal lived experience and feminist concerns, exploring how power, care, and gender operate within domestic and social spaces. Using found objects, reclaimed textiles, and reworked text, she tells intimate stories that connect to shared, collective experiences.
Hailey works with materials historically associated with femininity and the home; cloth, thread, and everyday objects that carry traces of previous lives. She reworks these materials into quilts, books and installations incorporating printed, embroidered, and appliquéd text. Through acts of repair, repetition, and transformation, her work asks how memory is held, whose labour is valued, and how private experience becomes political.
After postgraduate study at Goldsmiths College, she settled in South East London for 15 years working as an artist, tutor and freelance artist educator, working in a number of further education colleges and with the following creative partners; The Natural History Museum, The British Museum, SPACE London, The Cultural Olympics (Southbank and The Roundhouse), Bloomsbury Festival, The Foundling Museum, University College Hospital, The October Gallery, Chelsea Physic Garden, The Fashion & Textile Museum and Orleans House Gallery.
Her work is held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
She was selected for the Swedenborg Film Festival, London, 2025 and for an Artist’s Book residency at the Women’s Studio Workshop, New York, 2020.
She has been awarded commissions by Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Southwark Council and CBRE.
Her work has been featured in the following publications:
Objects and Us: Why Humans Need Design, Gus Casley Hayford, 2026.
Out of the Box: A Celebration of Contemporary Box Art, Tom Buchanan and Sarah Lee, 2022.
Textiles Now, Drusilla Cole, 2008.
Making Meaning, Textiles in Lockdown podcast and ebook held in Gawthorpe Textile Collections archive, 2020.
Exhibitions
Swedenborg Film Festival, London, 2025
Folde, The Mint House, Pevensey, 2025
Perspectives, Espacio Gallery, London, 2025
Hidden, The House of Smalls, Edinburgh, 2024
Totgeliebt, Semmelweissklinik, Vienna, Austria, 2024
Moral Fibre, The House of Smalls, Edinburgh, 2024
The Receding Shore, Electro Studios, St Leonards, 2024
Coastal Currents, Folde, Observer Building, Hastings, 2023
Pop up gallery, Art and Plants, Hastings, 2022
Coastal Currents, No place like home, Hastings, 2022
Two Tidal Towns, Artist Exchange, Monkton Arts, Isle of Wight, 2021
House of Annetta, London, 2021
Present Future, Curated shop front, Hastings, 2021
The Space In Between, 54 Gallery, London, 2021
New Beginnings, On-line Exhibition, 2021
The Art of Isolation, Espacio Gallery, London, 2020
Hastings Open, Hastings Museum, 2020
State of Mind, Stour Space, London, 2019
Open House, Hastings, 2018
Threads, Espacio Gallery, London, 2018
Festival of Quilts, Birmingham, 2014
Nunhead Gallery, London, 2013
We love Peckham, Southwark Council Tooley St, London, 2012
We love Peckham, Peckham Multiplex Cinema, London, 2012
We love Peckham, Southwark Cathedral, London, 2012
Untold Stories, Together Gallery, London, 2011
Up close: in detail, Mall Gallery, London, 2011
Kensington and Chelsea College gallery, London, 2011
Open House, East Dulwich, London, 2010
Rarefind, New Ashgate Gallery. Farnham, 2008
Origin: The London Craft Fair, Somerset House, London, 2007
Islington Design Show, Candid Arts, London, 2007
Origin: The London Craft Fair, Somerset House, London, 2006
Islington Design Show, Candid Arts, London, 2006
Contemporary Textile Fair, Teddington Arts Centre, London, 2005/6
Top Drawer, Earls Court, London, 2004
Design Front, Southend-on-Sea, 2004
Mesh, Broadway Market, London, 2004
The British Craft Show, Harrogate, 2004
Women’s Work, Farnham, 2003
Forces of Nature, Redditch, 2002
Treeline Gallery, Bakewell, 2001