ARTLINE, May 2026
“I felt myself offered another worthwhile life,” says Turner Prize winner Kate Hoylake
Total collapse and months of blindness changed Kate Hoylake from a party girl into a socially aware artist.
In conversation with art critic J D Lesny.
As she enters the room, Kate Hoylake is deceptively slight, clad in a loose short-sleeved lilac top over a floor length skirt. Her dark hair is cut into a fetching pageboy which sets off the pallor of her almost spherical face. But look closer and you will spot the tight muscles on her upper arms.
“With my kind of work, you have to keep in shape. It’s not like being a portraitist or a landscape painter. I’m forever moving things around, lifting stuff up, bending down, beating things into shape.” She eyes a pile of rubble sitting incongruously against the studio wall under a reproduction of Velasquez’s Venus. “So I’m up every morning at five without fail and down the gym for a good workout.”
This doesn’t sit well with Hoylake’s reputation as a hellcat, out-drinking and out-partying Tracey Emin at her wildest. “That was when I was young and foolish.” She blushes bright red, which makes her look more like a pageboy than ever. “As all youngsters imagine, I thought I was indestructible. The world was my oyster. All I had to do was be me and the world would come rushing to tell me how wonderful I was.”
Indeed, Kate Hoylake was an infant prodigy, famous with her first exhibition in a top west End gallery at seven, a graduate of the Royal College at fifteen, her paintings exhibited all over the world. At twenty she was washed up, a curiosity, another shooting star disappearing into the vastness of the cosmos. Forgotten by the art world, she became a fixture in the tabloid press for her riotous exploits in night clubs and at black tie dinners.
“I was dead drunk for most of the noughties. Paradoxically, it was gin which saved me.” She pauses, cheekily pouring herself a glass of clear liquid from a Gordon’s bottle. “Want some?”
I decline ungracefully.
“It was the night of the Academy summer show opening. Spent the afternoon drinking my way through a bottle of Gordon’s finest before meeting up with the girls in a pub in Soho. By that time I could hardly stand. The private view was a disaster. Wine on top of the gin and cocktails. I spewed up all down the President’s dinner jacket and passed out in the middle of the floor. One of the security guards picked me up to throw me out and was half way to the door when he noticed I wasn’t breathing. Poor bugger had to give me mouth-to-mouth while waiting for the ambulance to arrive.”
Hoylake was in hospital for three months while doctors attempted to repair the damage to her intestines and liver function. What had she thought about over those months?
“Mostly I was thinking about whether I was going to die and what it would be like being dead. Towards the end I started to worry I wasn’t going to be able to walk again or that my arms wouldn’t function properly. Being blind was the scariest . The doctors said my sight might come back, but they weren’t sure. Some friends brought me in a Bluetooth receiver and hooked me up to a twenty-four hour news service.”
I wonder why they had chosen a news service rather than something more varied, like talking books. Hoyland laughs, a cynical boom which sounds like a prelude to Scrooge giving his opinion of Christmas.
“They knew I’d never read a book in my life. Or knowingly watched a news broadcast, come to that. Something restful was what they were after. I don’t suppose it occurred to them how much it would stir me up. By the time I got out of hospital I’d gone from being a booze junkie to being a news junkie. Another drink?”
She pours me a glass from the gin bottle, leaning back to enjoy my surprise at the pure taste of the water. Nowadays Hoylake is strictly teetotal, whilst admitting to other pleasures.
“Weed is good, but it leaves me dozy for hours. I can’t work and smoke weed. Coke is better, especially when the work’s not going well or when I have to finish something to a deadline. You can function for years on coke, as long as you keep it under control and have enough money to fund the habit. Far better than booze or tobacco. It will get me in the end, I’m sure, but with my liver I’m not destined for a long life anyway. And I’m a dependant personality, so if it weren’t coke it would be something else which would kill me even quicker.”
She doesn’t seem depressed by the thought of dying young. At twenty-eight, a demise at forty or fifty looks a long way off. For someone with such an easy attitude to her own death the frankly morbid nature of here new work comes as something of a surprise.
“Well, months of listening to nothing other than news reports has to have some kind of effect.” The Scrooge gurgle again. “That and my marriage to Fadel.”
Hoylake met Fadel Hafeez in hospital, shortly before her discharge. He had been caught up in a fight during a political demonstration, which would have led to his arrest if he had not been so obviously in need of medical attention. The pair moved in together and were married six months later in a complicated ecumenical ceremony. A flood of accomplished paintings flowed from Hoylake’s new studio, in a complete contrast to the delicate, airy table-top sculptures for which she had been known.
“I was very lucky,” she says, though the frown on her face seems to contradict this. “Word had got around that the gallery was going to drop me because of my previous riotous behaviour. The Me-too people got to hear about it and put it down to pure misogyny. Then the disabled lobby joined in, claiming I was being persecuted because of my medical history. In the end, the gallery compromised, began to put my new work in their mixed shows.”
This was the start of the work you are doing now? I asked. What prompted the change? For a moment I thought Hoylake was going to dodge the question, as she has done in so many other interviews. She gathered herself together like a hedgehog confronted by a nosey fox.
“All the time in hospital,” she began, reaching for the bottle as if pretending it is gin inside, not water, “I heard about so many peoples fleeing from war and repression, forced into mass emigration. When I came out, things were no different. Night after night I sat swearing at the television, damning various regimes and war lords. ‘You are fucking boring,’ said Fadel. ‘Why don’t you do something about it instead of sitting there on your fat arse.’ That’s when I began the series which started with the Rohingya painting.”
Now in the Tate Gallery, the Rohingya painting, entitled Visions of Eternity is about one hundred and twenty centimetres square. The top half is dedicated to two lilac Perspex doughnuts, each containing a coiled run of neon. A heavenly halo wraps around each. Below, nine vertical columns of small, green Perspex domes lie in their shadow.
“There they are,” says Hoylake, “huddled in their plastic tents, awaiting translation into the promised land. Have you ever noticed how the women, whether they are living in ankle deep mud or swirling desert sand, manage to keep their clothes and their children so neat and clean? Anyway, Fadel loved these at first, until they began to sell. The fights we had over them! ‘They are too pretty,’ he’d shout. ‘Where’s the soul? Where’s the grit?’ The war in Palestine brought it to a head. He moved out for a while, then reappeared weeks later with an old copy of John Hersey’s book on Hiroshima. He just stormed in, threw it at my head. ‘See what a real war is all about? See what will happen when the Zionists and the Islamists start throwing nukes at one another?’ ”
There is a new light in her face. I’ve seen this before in ecstatic churches when new members of the congregation suddenly find God or become overwhelmed by the holy spirit.
“I couldn’t put Hersey’s book down. Do you know it was arrested by US customs and impounded for years so no Americans would be faced with the horrors of what they had done? I couldn’t let the world get away with its enforced ignorance. What was needed was a new ‘Guernica’, or a ‘Disasters of War’. Aarenberg at the gallery nearly shat himself when he saw the initial drawings, until he realised how much publicity the work would bring in. Red-top and Fox notoriety would attract more attention than all the art magazines in the world. He knew he was on a winner.”
Aarenberg was right. Hoylake’s installation at his gallery brought in shrieks of consternation from all the usual directions: hypocritical newspapers, cynical politicians, thinktanks funded by the arms industry and representatives of the moral majority everywhere.
In the centre of the space lay a scorched cow skin in the shape of a human shadow. To its left, a second human figure hunched over on its knees, arms enveloping its head, the whole covered with a mixture of brick and cement dust. An otherwise empty wall hosted the back view of a flayed human body, arms upraised, another cow skin attached to its heels spread backwards across the floor.
“They are all in Hersey’s book,” interposes Hoylake. “The shadows burnt into the ground, the child running with its peeling skin still attached to its calves, dead figures covered in radioactive dust.”
Despite, or more probably because of, the general furore, bidding for the piece was fierce. It finally sold to an un-named Japanese bidder for an undisclosed sum. Critics, including this one, labelled Hiroshima as ‘one of the great works of art of the twenty-first century….an unrivalled tour-de-force….more powerful than any number of peace marches.’
“Fadel hated it.” Hoylake twists the hem of her lilac top into a tight ball. “He hated how much money I made from it. He hated that it had been bought by a private collector to be hidden away so nobody would have to face its message. Most of all he hated it because it made me famous all over again. By the time the Turner prize exhibition came round the installation had gone to Japan and Fadel and I were no longer on speaking terms. All we did was to shout at one another and throw things when we ran out of words. Which is how I got this.” She turns to show a neatly sewn scar on the side of her temple.
“I got the better of him in the end. The version I made for the Turner show was much better than the original. The skin is far more lifelike and the body squirms as it curls. I can’t imagine I’ll ever make another artwork as good as this one.”
Her face empties of expression, as if the holy spirit has departed from her for ever. “Now Fadel has gone, there doesn’t seem to be much point.”
Such may be the case for now, but Hoylake’s resilience and talent will surely keep her in the studio and in the public eye for decades to come.
HOYLAKE MURDER CHARGE
Turner Prize artist arrested in dawn swoop
Sunday Enquirer, November 2026
In a shock move police officers yesterday invaded the studio of Turner prize artist Kate Hoylake (29). “I’ve done nothing” she shouted as she was dragged away in handcuffs.
Police refused to give any details except to say that a twenty-nine year old woman had been arrested and charged with murder.
Hoylake’s husband, Fadel Hafeez, has not been seen in public since the installation of her notorious Hiroshima piece at the Tate Gallery in April. The couple had not been on good terms for some time. “They fought like cat and dog,” said one friend. “Scratched and kicked, threw things. Her house was like a battlefield.”
The original Hiroshima was widely condemned by the Home Secretary as a piece of ‘violence pornography’, leading to demands for its enforced removal and the closure of the Aarenberg gallery. A Japanese collector, said to be close to the Japanese government, is said to have paid over twelve million dollars for the piece, at the time making it the most valuable artwork by a living artist.
Hoylake is known for her drunken outbursts and violent behaviour, which led to a long stay of forced rehabilitation. Speculation is rife that her illness made her even more unstable and violent.
HIDEOUS DISCOVERY AT TATE GALLERY
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Director.
Daily Herald, December 2026
Tate Gallery staff reported their ‘shocked disbelief’ after they dismantled artist Kate Hoylake’s ‘Hiroshima’ installation under the watchful eye of Metropolitan Police officers.
“We were expecting it to be an easy task,” said gallery assistant Moeen Da (54). “I worked on the original, which was a fibreglass figure covered in cement dust. Messy, but quite light. This version was absolutely solid. We thought it must be reinforced concrete, something suitable for the work to be shown outdoors at a sculpture park.
“The police insisted we break it up. The Director was furious, insisted it could only be done if the artist agreed. In the end the copper flashed a warrant around, said he could do anything with it he wanted.
“We tried everything, ending up with a jack hammer borrowed from one of the builders working downstairs. You should have smelled the stink! When the rotting hand dropped out my mate was sick all over the floor. The police shooed us out after that. One of the coppers said to me afterwards the skin on the floor wasn’t cow hide at all but real human skin.”
“Amazing what these modern artists get up to.”
