Who are you

Born in 2002, Hayley Piret is a multi-disciplinary artist, working primarily with clay and paper. They graduated with their BFA in ceramics from RISD (2025). Currently based in Providence, RI.

I’m compelled by the anonymity of things, the abundance and lack of information that can occupy the same moment, how you can observe the live conditions of endangered species and not know who made your shoes. It is a case-by-case challenge of intimacy with an idea or material. It sounds abstract because it is. I like not to completely know what I am doing, to follow my nose towards particular understandings of things that run away from me. Art making can be a fiction writing, unseriously serious, and in the end, the understanding is not fictitious at all, but sturdy and dense and full of participation.

Clay is an elemental material for this wandering scheme. It has world histories, now and in the vast past. Ceramics is as old as our oldest toy and as new as our newest spaceship. It is extra real. I respect craftsmanship in every moment of work, not saying I am a master by any means, but I am aspirational. Aspirational of how it can connect people to people and people to history. I think empathy is at the center of this, an impulse for reciprocal recognition, the two-way understanding.

Email: hnpiret@gmail.com

Hayley’s Port