The end
(2022)

• Hugh HAYDEN

Hugh Hayden’s anthropomorphic sculptures and installations arise from a deep connection to nature and its organic materials. Transforming salvaged wood – itself loaded with histories of trauma, persecution and survival – into moving metaphors for the African-American experience, Hayden examines how our interactions with the environment are intimately connected with complex notions of class, race, identity and belonging. The artist draws the subject matter of his works from the objects and institutions that play a defining role in our individual and collective lives.

Hayden has used the classroom as a vehicle through which to interrogate deeply rooted issues related to subjects such as education and extinction. The intricately carved skeleton creatures occupying the hand-sculpted school desks represent long extinct dodos, flightless birds once native to the island nation of Mauritius that became one of the earliest casualties of European colonisation in Africa.

Exploring cultural transmission across space and time, The end reflects on the mixing of African and European cultures that has shaped the world we live in today, drawing connections between the seventeenth-century hunting of the dodo, the colonial pillaging and displacement of African artefacts, as well as the creation of a diaspora through slavery and its ongoing echoes in modern-day America.