About her
Hayley Warnham is a UK based artist. She is most well known for her collages and photography. Her art takes everyday moments, captured through old photographs, and creates something new and exciting. One of her most famous series is called ‘Everything is Beautiful’. This framework of art involves her blending her families personal history with artistic reinvention, using colour to reinterpret the past. Warnham’s background as a designer and illustrator heavily influenced her photographic work. She graduated the Royal College of Art in 2014 and quickly made a name for herself soon after. She collaborated with various different clients like: Penguin Books, Tate and Computer Arts Magazine. She is currently the Deputy Art Director at Oneworld Publications. She tends to use digital media as a way to engage with and reinterpret the past instead of just a tool. The images seen in the series ‘Everything is beautiful’, comes from photographs taken by Warnham’s grandfather during family holidays to the seaside. Hayley Warnham has stated that the image that holds the most significance to her is a photograph of her mum as a child. She found herself drawn to these faded, nostalgic images of her family’s life, which held a deep sense of history and memory. This admiration for old photographs is what ultimately led to her creating this series. She realised that these worn and grainy images that showed her a raw, unfiltered look at the past sometimes lacked the vibrancy and energy of the present. This sparked the idea in her head to reimagine these family photographs by adding colour and texture to them.
The method she used to create these images involved her blending traditional photography with modern technology, using digital manipulation. She begins with the original black and white photographs, preserving their authenticity while adding layers of digital colour and texture. Through this technique, she brings a fresh energy to the otherwise still images, reimagining them with bright, bold colours that contrast the faded monochrome tones of the original prints. By doing this, Warnham is able to highlight specific elements of the photographs, for example, the various people seen in the image. She wanted to ensure that she would preserve the integrity of the original photographs whilst also being able to experiment with composition and colour to help elevate the images.
The idea behind her body of work was finding and highlighting the beauty in the everyday and the overlooked. Her work encourages her viewers to reconsider their perceptions of what makes something beautiful in the surrounding world. The vibrant colours she adds into her grandfather’s old photographs transforms once mundane scenes into something powerful and interesting to look at. Overall, I believe her work allows her viewers to view things from a different perspective and helps to remind us of the beauty that exists in the smallest and most personal moments.
Image analysis
How she links to Union
Hayley Warnham’s series ‘Everything is Beautiful’ links to the theme of union and friendship through her use of colour and digital manipulation to create new vibrant images from vintage photographs. The vibrant colours she adds into these old, black and white images creates a warm and fun tone to the images. This is similar to the emotions you experience whilst being around your friends. Her work highlights how our connections with others (eg friends) transforms our experiences and perspectives, making the world seem brighter and more meaningful. Additionally, her use of bright, bold colours layered over black and white images create an energy and vibrancy into the once melancholy and muted photographs. I interpret the colours in her work as representing the positive impact relationships have on our lives. For example, friends tend to bring a sense of joy and belonging to individuals, which Hayley has then conveyed through the use of bold colours which make the scenes more lively and engaging (similarly to friendships). I see the transformation from black and white to colour in her work as a parallel to how friendships illuminate the world around us, turning mundane moments into something extraordinary. By enhancing these moments between people with colour, Warnham highlights the significance of connection for humankind. Furthermore, the presence of friends can drastically shift the tone of any situation (just like how the use of colour clearly changes the mood and energy of her photographs). Friendship has the power to take an ordinary moment into something extraordinary. By overlaying colour onto her grandfather’s photographs, Warnham highlights how typically boring, everyday experiences can be made more meaningful and fun when shared with others.