Photo by Garry Trinh, 2022
Dr Hayley Megan French is a Western-Sydney based artist, curator, writer, researcher and community advocate whose practice is deeply rooted in questions of place-making, memory, landscape and belonging. She lives and works on Dharug land, and draws on her personal geography in Western Sydney and Parramatta to explore how we locate ourselves within suburbia, history and landscape.
French holds a PhD in Contemporary Australian Painting from Sydney College of the Arts (University of Sydney), awarded in 2015, for a thesis exploring the influence of Aboriginal art on Australian Painting. Her thesis was recognised with the prestigious CHASS Australia Student Prize for its important contribution to national conversations about art, identity and place.
French’s artistic practice works across painting, photography, text and curation. Often moving between abstraction and representation, her work—whether in large-scale abstract paintings, suburban line-works or intimate suburban vignettes—documents and reimagines home, suburbia, movement and memory. Through series such as The Pipeline, Walking Paths and Suburban Line Paintings French creates a growing archive that contemplates what suburbia and home mean in the Australian imagination.
She exhibits widely—in artist-run, regional and commercial galleries around Australia—including solo exhibitions at Penrith Regional Gallery + The Lewers Bequest, Broken Hill Regional Gallery and The Condensery.
In addition to her studio practice she brings a strong curatorial and community-oriented commitment. From 2018-2024 she worked with Parramatta Artists Studios (PAS) and the City of Parramatta’s Community & Culture team—in roles including Curator and Artist Development, later Cultural Services Coordinator—commissioning new works, developing public programs, and forging curatorial partnerships with major institutions and regional centres. French is currently a Councillor for the City of Parramatta.
Parallel to her art and curatorial work, French contributes critical essays and writing on contemporary art, suburbia, memory and landscape to publications including Sydney Review of Books, Art Collector Magazine, Eyeline Contemporary Visual Arts Journal and Semaphore.
Through her intersecting roles—artist, curator, consultant, researcher and Councillor—Hayley Megan French continues to reflect on what it means to belong in Western Sydney and Australia more broadly. Her practice remains committed to centring memory and place, while opening space for critical, poetic and collective conversations about identity, home and landscape.