'Hugh Hayden’s Splintered Realities' – frieze
25 September 2025
The artist on how he reshapes the familiar – from cookware to classrooms – into wooden sculptures that expose the fault lines of American life.
Terence Trouillot: I know you’re currently working on your upcoming show at Lisson Gallery in London this autumn and just coming off the heels of your exhibition ‘American Vernacular’ at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. You also had a huge survey last year in your hometown of Dallas, Texas, at the Nasher Sculpture Center, aptly titled ‘Homecoming’. But before we get to all that, I thought we could speak about your contribution to ‘Ground/work 2025’, a public sculpture exhibition in the grounds of the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts. You’re presenting a large-scale wood sculpture titled the End [2025]. Can you tell me more about it?
Hugh Hayden: Yeah! It’s a sculpture in the woods. I’m really excited about it because it’s not a temporary piece, but it’s also not permanent – it’s somewhere in between. It’s made from hemlock wood, which is native to the region, and over time it’s going to decay naturally. So, unlike bronze or concrete, it’s going to just disappear. It takes the shape of a whale skeleton, its ribcage and spine, with tree branches protruding or growing outward from the ribs – just in the middle of this forest, adjacent to a trail. It essentially camouflages into the surrounding trees. I love how, depending on the season, it becomes more or less visible. In winter, for instance, it will blend in more with the environment. You won’t know where it begins or ends.
TT: So it’s also about camouflage – which I know is a topic that fascinates you.
HH: Absolutely. I’m really drawn to the idea of camouflage – not just visual, but conceptual. Skeletons are raceless, genderless – you can’t tell the sexuality of a person based on their skeletal structure. There’s a universality in that. And it’s similar to the bark of a tree: most people can’t tell a maple from an oak without the leaves. That ambiguity excites me.
TT: It reminds me of your earlier work with the school desks and branches seemingly bursting out of them, like your Brier Patch [2022] installation at Madison Square Park in New York. HH That project was 100 school desks with tree branches coming out of them. Those works are always shown in parks – on cut grass, or some other sort of manicured lawn – never in a truly natural landscape. But recently, we permanently installed 20 desks in Sharjah, in the desert. I like the idea of them getting covered by the sand or being completely submerged by it, and then at some point being re-revealed. There’s another version in St. Louis, at Laumeier Sculpture Park. Those are also about blending into their environment. The one in the park was on mown grass, so it didn’t quite integrate in the same way. But this one at the Clark is in the woods – real woods – and already a sapling has started growing through it.
TT: It’s like the work becomes part of the ecosystem – or returns to it.
HH: That’s always been part of the work – reinstituting it into nature, in some sense. The material choice, the shape, even the site: it’s all about that relationship between the artificial and the organic. I have always used salvaged wood. Originally, in New York City, when I was going to Columbia for my MFA, I sourced some trees that had died in a park. We would walk by them in St. Nicholas Park on the weekends, on the way to the studio. I knew someone at the Parks Department and was able to get in touch with the right people to retrieve these blue spruces that had died. I ended up making a piece out of them – this Lexus dashboard [Untitled Lexus Dash, 2017] that’s at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Read the full interview via frieze here.
Image: Hugh Hayden, 2025. Image commissioned for frieze; photography by Ashley Markle
