Colm’s images feel like half-remembered dreams: moody, dust-washed scenes that hover between realism and imagination. Working predominantly in a digital media that recalls the intimacy of charcoal, chalk, and pencil, his drawings capture fleeting moments of tenderness and melancholy with startling honesty.
At just 17, Colm began posting fan art for Ethel Cain (Hayden) under the handle @vqtkufi, quietly building a devoted following in the internet’s more shadowed corners. His early sketches and stop-frame animations, haunting hand-drawn fragments, caught the attention not only of Hayden's fans but of Hayden herself, who began sharing his work with her audience. By spring 2025, Colm’s illustrations, filled with Southern Gothic dusk, imagined landscapes, and echoes of teenage longing, had become inseparable from the lyric world Hayden was shaping in her album Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You. Cain put it plainly:
“Colm’s illustrations of Willoughby & Ethel have broken and healed my heart so many times over the course of finishing this record… I have all his illustrations in a folder on my phone that I sometimes just stare at and cry, they're so good”. — Hayden (Ethel Cain)
It wasn’t long before Hayden commissioned Colm to design "The Kiss", an official T-shirt for her world tour while he was still finishing his A-Levels. Limited edition prints of his artwork quickly followed on this online store, with each print run selling out in a matter of hours, swiftly establishing a base of collectors across the world.
In October 2025 Colm's debut exhibition This Was All For You, was timed to coincide with Hayden’s sold-out residency at London's iconic Hammersmith Apollo. An overwhelming success, it was attended by thousands of people over four days, including Hayden who, before her final Apollo performance, visited Colm's exhibition for a private viewing, spending time with him in the gallery before the show. For most fans, Colm's exhibition felt less like a detour than an extension of Hayden's shows themselves.
In Spring 2026, Colm embarked on a two-week road trip, following Hayden on her U.S. tour through Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama, before finishing in her hometown of Tallahassee, Florida. Along the way, he hosted art pop-ups in record stores, cafés, restaurants, and parking lots, meeting fans, selling posters and totes, filming for a documentary, and sketching the Deep South. Colm used the journey to step inside the world that had long inspired his imagination, feeling the Southern heat, seeing the Spanish moss hanging from roadside trees, and tracing the dirt roads, abandoned buildings, and forgotten landscapes woven throughout Cain's music.
Colm is an artist who feels, in many ways, perfect for this moment: visually fluent, elusive, and deeply online. His drawings do not just illustrate Hayden's world…they help deepen it.
