HAYLEY NACEY
People are usually only present in Nacey’s painting in the forms of objects left behind after they’ve left the room - a photograph on a windowsill, a toy horse on a stool, an unmade bed.
Like many artists who find a personal way of expressing a view on their world, Nacey starts from the hyper-local, the interior of her Georgian home in Wellington. Her family life has made it both studio and subject. “Every room has a sash window with a unique split view.” Those windows, their frames, what they disclose, and most importantly the light they admit, are a constant presence in the paintings.
Hayley’s training as a photographer has also imprinted itself in her works, both in terms of process and approach to composition. “I move my camera and tripod around the house, following the light. The windows are a fixed structure, but the light is transient, ever-changing. And I’m inside looking out. I find that very interesting.” In her more recent works, a tendency to incorporate greater areas of negative space and to heighten contrasts between light and shadow allows the pictures to develop deeper, more contemplative moods.
It’s no surprise that Nacey feels a kinship with the Seventeenth Century Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer, whose perfectly poised and light-bathed interiors are theorized to have employed the relatively newly invented camera obscura to create a projected facsimile of a real view from which a composition for a painting could be transcribed. “I love those paintings because they’re everyday scenes, just people going about daily life, those beautiful rich colours, the dramatic lights and darks. That’s what I want.” ‘Albatross’ uses its flickering tonal drama to animate its longing for a wingspan that might transport one home. The light striking the curtains, suggests white wings seen against a darkened sky – the mundane made mythical. The window frame again functions as a more-than-just-physical portal between the inner world and the outer, between the world of realities and the world of reflections.
Hayley Nacey grew up in Gisborne in a house on a hill with beautiful dormer windows. In many ways she still thinks of that house as ‘home’ and admits that much of her inspiration still stems from it. Details of her current house in Wellington, like the window latches remind her of it. “I’m probably driven by a lot of nostalgia, the desire to return to that space and time.” Nacey paints the interior of her new home with a devoted eye for both details and meaning that suggests that the self-imposed limitations of her practice might disclose the infinite – “from the inside looking out” as she puts it. Or you might say that her painting constitutes a kind of reconstruction of the past, but via new means and new subjects in a new place.