Gianna Christella Hayes

About the work

The TAKEAWAY exhibition takes place at Canberra Contemporary from 12 September-24 October 2026 and features works by Marley Dawson, Keg de Souza, Gianna Christella Hayes, Gillian Kayrooz, Zora Pang, Janhavi Salvi, and James Tylor. Presented as part of Canberra Art Biennial 2026, the show is accompanied by a public program at multiple venues across Canberra themed around gastropoetics, food security, and diaspora eating imaginaries. Included in the show is a pop-up reading area by Magenta House featuring publications and ephemera that serve as ‘side-dishes’ to the themes explored by the participants of this project. Ultimately, TAKEAWAY takes a regenerative approach into why and how we eat, while digesting fraught histories and ecologies of land, water and labour.

Images

About the artist

Gianna Christella Hayes was born in Tongva Land/Los Angeles and currently lives and works across Dharug & Gundungurra Country/Western Sydney and Gadigal Land/Sydney. Their multidisciplinary practice spans textiles, film, and immersive installations, often incorporating soil, seeds, plants, and botanical dyes to explore identity, migration, and the reclamation of ancestral diasporic practices disrupted by colonial powers. Hayes has served as a nature pedagogy educator leading youth in nature play immersions at Greater Sydney Parklands & Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney, alongside being the founder of Hilum Earth – a living archive and embodied research lab that takes shape through creative botanical workshops and seed swap initiatives to celebrate the interconnection of plants, people and memories. Hayes’s work and workshops have been presented at the Art Gallery of NSW, Powerhouse Museum, Cement Fondue and Runway Journal. In 2025, she was a selected artist for the Altitude Program at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre.