Hadfield's poems and visual art are based on her experience of living, working and traveling in Shetland and the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, and Canada.

[1] Themes in Hadfield's poems include home and belonging, wildness and subsistence, landscape and language, and the Shetland dialect.

[2] Her first collection, Almanacs (Bloodaxe Books, 2005) was written in Shetland and the Western Isles in 2002, thanks to a bursary from the Scottish Arts Council.

[2] In 2007, a Dewar Award enabled Hadfield to travel in Mexico and research Mexican devotional folk art.

She "created a solo exhibition of 'Shetland ex-votos in the style of sacred Mexican folk art' – tiny, portable, insistently familiar landscapes packed in an array of weathered tobacco tins.