Hayley is a jewellery designer/maker from Barnsley, South Yorkshire. Her first real taste of silversmithing was during the second year of her extended diploma in 2011. She weighed up her options by studying interdisciplinary art courses and after a short apprenticeship in a second-hand jewellers, she decided to proceed further with creative education.  
 
The first course of her creative career was her Higher National Diploma in 2017. She specialised in portrait photography and focussed her Final Major Project around the aspects of mental health that you don’t see. Her project titled ‘Just because you can't see something doesn't mean it doesn't exist’ consists of 24 individual portraits which are accompanied by a waveform. These were recorded by each sitter in private after the photograph was taken and transformed into a visual format. By juxtaposing a portrait photograph with an unreadable but literal waveform of each sitter’s voice, the viewer knows that the sitter said something, but only the sitter knows what their waveform reads. The body of work was made to resemble passing individuals as the viewer goes about their daily lives. Everyone you walk past has something going on in their minds, but you have absolutely no idea what they’re thinking. 

During her undergraduate study in 2020, she experimented further with the formal qualities of photographs by transforming them into 3D objects which she then made into pieces of jewellery. She chose a selection of casting techniques to specialise in and perfect during her undergraduate study, which has allowed her to create what she now calls her Lithocasts. Her undergraduate project, The Fiction Of Memory, consists of 20 impactful Lithocast images during the Covid19 pandemic accompanied by handwritten notes from an audience about the moment they started to worry about the pandemic. She has since registered her Hartorium logo as a trademark which protects the processes associated with making Lithocasts, along with applying for her own Hallmark under the Sheffield Assay Office in early 2021 to further authenticate her pieces. 

Her final course of study was a Masters in Jewellery & Metalwork Design at Sheffield Hallam University early post pandemic. Her postgraduate projects heavily focussed on our memory, our senses, and the act collecting and both projects have an overarching theme of how our hobbies can relieve our stress. Her MA Project, Curating the Collected, explored how the act of collecting could relieve psychological tension through the jewellery making practice. The objects made from collections act as a catalyst for conversation between likeminded people, this conversation then leads to an increase of endorphins in the body, making the participants feel good and thus helping to combat the physical symptoms of stress.  

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Following her studies, Hayley has turned to freelancing and developing her designs and creative practice, alongside teaching the part-time adult silversmithing classes held at Barnsley College.