attia hayee

The Beautiful Uncertainty of Attia Hayee

Summer 2026

There is a tension running through Attia Hayee’s work, a thread that binds together houses and bodies, memory and landscape, grief and wonder. Her images appear delicate at first glance, rendered in pale washes and open space, yet beneath their quiet surfaces lies something unsettled. They are works preoccupied with thresholds: between childhood and adulthood, certainty and doubt, belonging and exile, life and whatever waits beyond it.

The paintings commissioned for Issue Two emerge from Hayee’s ongoing series maladroit and confused, a title that feels at once self-effacing and deeply revealing. The phrase suggests awkwardness, disorientation. Yet the works themselves demonstrate the opposite. Their power comes from an artist willing to inhabit uncertainty rather than resolve it.

Throughout the series, red threads recur as both image and metaphor. They connect figures to unseen histories, bind bodies to places, and pull disparate elements into fragile relationships. In one work, a house seems to grow from a tangle of crimson fibres. In another, a figure dissolves into shadow while remaining tethered to an invisible counterpart. These threads function less as symbols than as questions. They ask what connects us to one another, to memory, to the stories we inherit and carry.

What is striking is the way Hayee resists explanation. Her images are narrative without becoming illustrative. They hint at myths, dreams, and private histories but refuse to settle into a single interpretation. Like the strongest literary fiction, they leave space for ambiguity.

That ambiguity appears central to her artistic vision. Hayee has described being drawn not to specific memories but to states of feeling, to existing between places, identities, certainties, and confusions. The paintings seem to inhabit precisely that territory. They are less interested in answers than in the emotional landscapes created by questions.

Literary influences lie beneath the surface. One senses an affinity for writers who concern themselves with memory, identity, and the instability of reality. Yet the work never feels derivative. Instead, it transforms those concerns into a visual language uniquely its own: spare, dreamlike.

Perhaps what makes these pieces so compelling is their refusal to declare what they mean. They trust the viewer. In an age increasingly devoted to certainty, immediacy, and explanation, Hayee’s work offers something rarer: permission to remain in the unknown. The paintings do not illuminate the darkness so much as teach us how to look within it.

And it is there, in that space between understanding and mystery, that maladroit and confused finds its enduring power.

Attia Hayee’s commissioned artwork series appears in its entirety alongside the six stories of Issue Two, available exclusively in print.

Reserve Issue Two

A Conversation with Attia Hayee

How did maladroit and confused begin?

Pretty randomly. I started the page during my university days as a place to dump creative work without spamming my personal Instagram. Since then it’s gone through multiple phases of abandonment, revival, experimentation, and complete changes in direction, and has become a reflection of wherever I happened to be creatively at the time.

What drew you toward visual art in the first place?

I’ve been making art since I was a kid. It always felt like a language that came more naturally to me than words.

Is there one work in the series that feels especially significant to you?

I connected with each story in a different way, so it’s difficult to choose just one. But if I had to pick the works that feel most personal to me, they would probably be Favourite Places and Look. Both touch on themes and feelings that are quite close to my own experiences, so I found myself returning to them often throughout the process.

How do you see visual art and literature speaking to one another?

I think they’re trying to do the same thing from different directions. Both can hint at something much bigger than what’s actually shown on the page.

What kinds of stories, writers, or books have influenced your artistic imagination?

As a child I was mostly drawn to fantasy fiction and mystery novels. Since then my interests have become a bit more scattered. These days I enjoy poetry, metaphysical and Sufi literature, philosophy, science (especially physics, which is funny because I absolutely despised it at school), and Russian classics to name a few.

Some writers I find myself returning to are Al-Ghazali, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Toni Morrison, Milan Kundera, Ibn Arabi, Carlo Rovelli, Brian Greene, Richard Feynman and Edward Feser.

I think what connects all of them is a fascination with questions of identity, meaning, memory, reality, and the strange experience of being human

What drew you to collaborate with The Fifth Corner?

The conversation between writing and image felt very natural to me. I liked that the journal leaves space for interpretation rather than trying to pin everything down.

What are you working on next?

Quite a few things actually. The growing reach of the page over the past year has led to a lot of unexpected opportunities and conversations with interesting creative people, so I’m trying to be a bit more present here while also balancing my day job.

At the moment there are a couple of exhibition discussions and some collaborations. Hopefully I’ll continue making work that confuses me just enough to stay interested in it, as I do struggle with consistency in life and therefore in art.

Attia Hayee is a multidisciplinary Pakistani-Australian artist based in Melbourne, Australia. She uses versatile materials such as graphite, charcoal, ink, powdered pigments, wax, and stitched thread on old textured paper. Her work reflects themes of split identity, inherited memory, loss, displacement, and confusion.