He has won the John Moores Painting Prize, holds a PhD in Fine Art from Kingston University, and is an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins.
[2] Hays won the £20,000 John Moores Painting Prize in 1997 with his work Harmony In Green, a depiction of a hamster cage of exactly his height.
[6][4] Michael Archer, writing for Artforum in 1998, said that while Hays' work depicts mundane details of ordinary life, such as cages for pets, these subjects are better viewed as a way of reflecting on painting itself.
[7] Hays says that since the late 1990s his work has focused on "the relationship between the intangible, encoded and instantaneous realm of digital technology, and the tactile, flawed and time-consuming medium of painting".
[5] Works in his 2006 exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery, Colorado Impressions, used painting to reproduce digital artefacts like pixellation and the effect of a low-resolution JPEG file.