Art Friday: Haley Nagy

Describing herself as both artist and procrasinator, Haley Nagy made an immediate impact on me with The Nagy Family Cookbook, a beautifully evocative artist’s book.

Working in mixed media, with a real feel for using encaustic, Haley creates captivating work often addressing contemporary issues such as homelessness and cultural rituals like birthdays. The crux of her work is to explore the ‘hidden’.

In the photoessay series Saving Yourself: Steps to Preserving the Chastity of Adolescent Girl, Haley causes her work to interact with its audience by leaving dirty smudge marks on their fingers, in an exploration of the connotations of the word ‘unclean’.

It was difficult to choose only three pieces of Haley’s work, but I have selected the following pieces to show her range. The first is a detail from the artist’s book which first captivated me. The second is from her Seen but not Heard series about the homeless. The third (look closely) shows the subtlety of her latest work.

You can find Haley at her website, Flickr and follow her on Twitter.