Hayley
Hayley Mills-Styles is a textile artist. She was brought up by her paternal grandparents from the age of two and a half.
Her grandad passed away in 1997, and her grandma in 2015.
“It’s weird how you can have such a visceral response to a sofa.
I was in Poverty Aid and there was a clamshell-back sofa for sale – incredibly itchy fabric from the 1930s. It was the same as the one we had when I was growing up, so I bought it and started creating a story about my life.
My Grandma was getting dementia quite badly; she knew who I was, she could remember her childhood and her life, but not our life together, so I started making work about that because I realised that there were only two people left in the world who had lived it and she didn’t remember anymore.
I made work with little stories, embroidering photographs of my Grandma and things about our life together as a way of recording them. Some of the photos are really quite abstract because the whole thing was about the idea of things that people could remember and things that people couldn’t.
There’s a polaroid shaped one, taken before I was born - about 1976. In the background is the Ford Cortina that my Grandad had. My Grandma’s just standing in the garden.
There’s one of me and my Grandma in Scarborough on the seafront.
Coffee rings were a huge thing - you could never put anything on a table, always had to have a coaster; we must have had about a hundred table mats. I embroidered a coffee ring on a tray cloth that my great, great Grandma had made. You only get one shot at it.
In 2018 I had a big exhibition in Whitby Museum called Archive and Other Stories which told my life story through my work using museum objects as reference points.
I did a portrait of my Grandma and Grandad based on a sampler. Samplers have key phrases on them like ‘home sweet home’ or people’s names. I wanted their phrases.
My Grandad’s says ‘look no hands’ because every time he was going to do something dangerous, he would say ‘look no hands’.
He used to steer the car with his knees. ‘Look no hands.’
My Grandma’s says, ‘well she looked at me’. She always said that.
My best friend and husband deconstructed the sofa while I was at work. We kept all the objects we found in it; an old penny, a crochet hook, a label, an invoice stub, and – do you remember those things that dispensed little rectangles of Dairy Milk? We found the wrapper of one of those. I’ve got an embroidery of it.
It seemed quite nice that the end of the sofa’s life would be with me, which sounds really strange and ominous, but I liked the idea that it would finish with me and that would be it.
“Grief doesn’t go away, it just changes and you find new ways to cope with it.”
Everybody experiences grief but you can feel quite isolated in it. Creativity is a way to connect; I’ve met amazing people through the work I’ve done around bereavement.
It’s such a great way to express what you’re feeling. Don’t be put off by skill level, I think that’s something that frightens people, but actually anything you can do - picking up an adult colouring book, reading a piece of poetry, just writing something down - that act of being creative is the thing that can help you get through a big trauma in your life, help focus your mind, and give you something to concentrate on - those skills can be very beneficial.
My creativity saves me. I don’t know how I would survive without it.”
You can see Hayley’s portfolio and find out about her textile and embroidery workshops on her website www.hayleymillsstyles.com
Written by Faye Dawson