Hugh Hayden

PROJECT
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.

In his practice, Hugh Hayden reconstructs vernacular objects in the American landscape, subverting their utility to question cultural history. The Cosby’s comprises a series of cast iron skillets that have been reimagined as West African masks. Hugh Hayden comments on the cultural impact of the African diaspora on American entertainment, food, industry and society, drawing attention and crediting Black enslaved people working in kitchens with the development of modern American cuisine. Titled The Cosby’s, after the disgraced entertainer, Hayden has stated that The Cosby Show was important to him as a child and asks that we don’t abandon, even discredited, cultural history.

ABOUT
Hugh Hayden’s practice considers the anthropomorphisation of the natural world as a visceral lens for exploring the human condition. Hayden transforms familiar objects to challenge our perceptions of ourselves, others and the environment. Raised in Texas and trained as an architect, his work arises from a deep connection to nature and its materials. Wood is his primary medium, including objects as varied as discarded trunks, rare indigenous timbers, Christmas trees or souvenir African sculptures. He saws, sculpts and sands the wood, often combining disparate species, creating composite forms that reflect their complex cultural backgrounds. Hayden’s work questions the stasis of social dynamics and asks the viewer to examine their place within an ever-shifting ecosystem.

Purchased with funds donated by The Fleischner Family
Charitable Foundation, 2022

Loti & Victor Smorgon Fund, 2023

This artist has been supported by the Elizabeth Summons
Grant in Memory of Nicholas Draffin.