I am interested in performance and performativity, documentary practices, humour, subjectivity and fiction. Over the past few years, I have worked both individually and collectively and have learnt as much about how collectives function as I have about how I function as an individual. My commitment to working creatively around the current economic, social and ecological crises forged The Gluts (Hayley Newman, Gina Birch and Kaffe Matthews) and our eco-electro musical Café Carbon which we took to the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009 and subsequently performed at Whitechapel Art Gallery, Camden Arts Centre, Café Oto and Modern Art Oxford in 2010. For Café Carbon we wrote songs about food and climate; cheap chicken, food-transportation, over-consumption, water, allotments, mechanization and the beginning of modernity were all on the menu. The Gluts are on vimeo: https://vimeo.com/user9406355

Other work has included Milton Keynes Vertical Horizontal (MKVH, 2006), a public event in which volunteers were driven around the Milton Keynes road grid until their coach ran out of diesel. MKVH (the screenplay), published in 2008, was based on this journey. The book built on ideas around intersubjectivity, memory and narrative, commenting on peak oil with particular relation to the car-dependent culture of the new city of Milton Keynes. 

In 2009, writer Andrea Mason and I inaugurated the self-help group Capitalists Anonymous (CA), a forum for people to come and confess their capitalist tendencies. Originally set up for bankers in the wake of the economic crash, CA was seen as a therapeutic intervention that took place on the steps of the Royal Exchange in the City of London. 

My pre-Occupy novella Common, written as 'Self-Appointed Artist-in-Residence' in the City of London over the summer of 2011, was published by Copy Press in 2013. In Common I wrote about the economic crisis from within; as it was happening on the streets of the Square Mile. Alongside fantastical imaginings and writings from the heart, the book documents the crash in global markets caused by the downgrading of American debt, turbulence in the Eurozone and the protests/riots that started in London before spreading across Britain. 

In 2014 I completed the work Histoire Economique; frottage renderings of the fronts of banks in the City of London and Domestique a series of used dishcloths embroidered with faces. I am currently engaged with a related writing project Facadism (2012 - present); a novella about memory, faces and building facades.  

www.hayleynewman.org