GLEN HAYWARD – What Now?
Your sculptures resemble ‘trompe l‘oeil’ installations; they tease the viewer with an element of visual trickery and surprise. By recreating inconspicuous functional objects such as furnishings and fixings, the spectator may not even be aware that they are viewing an artwork. Is there an intentional playfulness in the work?
Like most comedians I am aware that the joke is more than often on myself. I can feel myself laughing as the viewer leaves the venue without seeing the work but at the same time feel that it may be a bit of a shame. It becomes just the idea of the work that one never saw, I imagine sometimes making a stamp that says, ‘This is not a Glen Hayward’ and covering the entirety of the world in it, well apart from my work, just so people know what to look for.
Your parents both worked in design and manufacturing. Did this influence you in your development as an artist?
I think growing up and being surrounded by sewing machines and having parents who imagined flat things like cloth, inhabiting the space around a person like clothing, must have influenced me, possibly causing me to never have the figure in my work, aside from the ‘walk on’ that is the viewer.
Did you have any artistic mentors when you were at art school?
I have been blessed with many great mentors and as a mimicker of people, not just objects, have inhabited them. I had Michael Parekowhai in his first year teaching as my sculpture tutor at high school. He wasn’t the reason I did sculpture, I think that is a temperament thing, but he definitely instilled in me a belief in the power of objects to speak if we listen hard enough.
At the recent Art Central in Hong Kong (held in March this year), you featured over a thousand handmade wooden nails – some rusty and bent – seemingly hammered into a wall. What was the response from this international audience?
The act of entering an international context is really about shifting gears; I enjoy the way that a big fish in a small pond is tested by trying bigger ponds. I am a very big fish in my studio. I have been pleasantly surprised by the response but it does take time to build context for the work… The irony about the work I showed, ‘Everyday People’, is I made it amongst the debris of a renovation surrounded by real bent nails; this was great though because my plumber wants a work as part payment.
In your 2016 survey show ‘Super-Ordinary’ (at Sergeant Gallery, Whanganui, New Zealand), you also recreated objects from the organic world, such as animal skulls, a giant snail and a tree log. Is your circle of focus growing wider?
Focus is a great word, I work best in response to opportunity, if my circumstances change so does the work. There is always the attempt to intercede, to be contrary and that doesn’t change whatever the subject matter, although carving a rat skull was an attempt to do something extraordinary. There is so much in the world available via the web to make one feel uninteresting I just wanted to do something that sat within this impossible competition.
Can you tell us a little about your next solo exhibition?
The next significant work is a duo show with Evan Woodruffe at Sydney Contemporary – he is producing an enormous abstract doodle across a Fibonacci formatted painting and I am carving a full-sized Toyota Corolla. It will be upside-down … this being the antipodes and the version from my childhood that I played in was a wreck in a paddock. Being upside-down, the interior in order to be viewed will require the audience to bend down and this brings them into the space of the child, this low space that we used to inhabit.
I have also been given the opportunity to have the timber from a shipwreck from 1850 and with what time and decay has left me dictating the scale, I am going to rebuild the original ship for the Wellington Sculpture Trust on the waterfront. It was/is called ‘The Inconstant’ which feels like a nice place to finish.
Glen Hayward is represented by Paul Nache Gallery in Gisborne, New Zealand.
His work can be seen at the Sydney Contemporary Art Fair from September 7-10, 2017.
