Video: Artist Interview
Paula Hayes

Paula Hayes discusses the importance of nurturance in her artwork and in society.

Through both living sculptures and mini-ecosystems, Hayes’s over two-decade body of work forges new relationships between artwork and owner and the natural and human environment. For Understory, Hayes will transform the Tang’s Payne Room into an immersive environment brimming with life. Part exhibition gallery, part lounge, and part dining room, the space will include a forest of large silicone planters housing small trees, a series of Hayes’s exquisite hand-blown glass terrariums home to a wide variety of plants and gems, and new custom-designed wallpaper and dinnerware.

Born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1958, and raised on a farm in upstate New York, Paula Hayes received her BS from Skidmore College and MFA from Parsons School of Design. In the late 1980s, Hayes merged her art with everyday practical concerns by developing a gardening business in New York City to help support her graduate studies. Her work has expanded to include large-scale garden design for public and private landscapes here and abroad; mesmerizing hand-blown glass terrariums; malleable silicone planters that change shape in response to a plant’s growth; crocheted necklaces that cradle living plants; and birdhouses, birdbaths, and feeders. Hayes’s role as nurturer constantly informs her practice; in 1999 she devised a necklace for carrying a plant on the body as a mother carries an infant. Owning her artwork requires similar attentiveness and care, and collectors must sign an “Agreement for a Living Artwork,” which outlines their obligation to maintain its life. A copy of that agreement, along with some of her earlier drawings and sculpture, appear on the Tang’s mezzanine.