Alister Hayes

BIOGRAPHY

Alister Hayes is a full-time teacher of art, design and photography at Portobello High School, Edinburgh. When is is not doing that, he makes a lot of photographic work in and around North Edinburgh. 

Hayes has been awarded a Coward Foundation Grant to expand his analogue photograph, and so has been working with large-format colour film and instanf film processes. 

He began to photograph a lot of his local urban landscape over lockdown, and after attending a Toyobo course at Edinburgh Printmakers in 2022, he has now created a large selection of Toyobo prints. He works with images from his own photographic practice that give a sense of ambiguity, making the landscapes look unmoored from their context. Although they are specific places and memories for him, he likes to imagine other people projecting their own memories and experiences onto them and finding a feeling of resonance. 

This printmaking process matters a lot to him, as he sees the physical prints as beautiful things that have a strange sense of dislocation to them. They look simultaneously old and contemporary which suits his subject matter and ideas.