Sometimes we find ourselves doing, and loving things that we never thought possible in the past.
An example for me – listening to Bob Dylan…I used to freaking hate his crap on the radio – “Hey Mr. Tambourine Man play a song for me…” Puke! The best lyricist ever? Yeah, and Doctor Seuss is the best poet. BUT – then I picked up some early live acoustic stuff, and have been a diehard fan since.
Well…back to Haley. She went through four years of art school at Kent State with an emphasis in drawing, then took a collage class (which she previously thought of in a negative light) and fell in love.
Since then, she’s been working almost entirely in mixed-media resin collages, and over that time period, has developed a technique which features a combination of cut-outs, drawing, and spray-paint – all immersed within thick layers of resin, which she manipulates with other materials and alchemist magic (seems this resin stuff has a unpredictable nature) to form luminous, glowing works of a surreal and other-worldly nature.
To help explain the subject matter and meaning behind the art, it usually helps to hear from the maker’s mouth…
CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT YOUR PROCESS?
I start out with a clear plexiglass acrylic tray. I usually spray-paint the back…but first, I figure out the collage and what I’m going to do. Then I start cutting out the background in pieces to layer it three dimensionally (usually found from National Geographic Magazines, or other old picture books). So, I put a layer down and then the resin on top of that. Sometimes, while the resin is drying, I rub things into it, or spray paint on it…sometimes when the resin is almost dry, you can spray paint on it and it will crackle and look almost like ashes and smoke.
WHERE DID YOU LEARN ALL THIS AT?
I went to Kent State for my BFA, where I majored in Drawing, but in my fourth year – I took a collage class, which I hated at first. I just thought that it didn’t make sense, because it wasn’t very beautiful…but as it turned out, after I left the class, it’s all I did. It was an evolution…I started out doing just normal collages with one layer, then I started liking a thicker layer of resin and pushing things into it which I played around with, and began to multi-layer it. I have a lot fun with them, they’re kind of like little dioramas, where I can juxtapose certain images and see how they connect with each other.
For my senior show at Kent, which…I feel like Kent State or any other school, forces you to come up with a conceptual idea. They’re like – “What is this about? Why are you doing this? You can’t just go into this mindlessly and just make what you want to make!” But that’s kind of what artists do in a way…at least I do. You go into your art mindlessly, not knowing exactly why, but then coming out with something you didn’t see from the beginning.
YEAH…I THINK ART IS MORE ABOUT COMMUNICATION THAN ANYTHING CONCEPTUAL.
Well…not at Kent State. You have to be able to write and talk about it, in-depth.
SO WHAT’D YOU COME UP WITH FOR YOUR WORK IN THE SENIOR SHOW?
I figured it out along the way. Half way through, I realized that I kept picking out pictures having to do with the agricultural era, the industrial era and technology era of today…and merging them together in order to show how quickly things move through time, and that at a certain point, the evolution of everything that came before it, from a simple action of kids on a swing-set…which represents simple mechanics, then at the same time, within the era of technology where everyone wants more and more and more.
I mean…I recycle and love the earth – I’m no tree-hugger, but I care. And my work sometimes looks like it’s full of pollution, but it’s not. People think that I’m into this anti-pollution angle when they see these pieces. But with the merging of these three eras, there is so much waste and disposal. It is more of a process for me, something that is inevitable…not like – “We have to stop this!”
SHOWING NOT TELLING…
Yeah, there is a process, and when it’s over, there’s a big destruction and a rebuilding. But I don’t really want to go any deeper, I just want to just make pictures.
