LOOKING THROUGH VOIDS

Hayden Allison Richer is a ceramic artist residing in Detroit, Michigan. Her interest lies in the mirroring and reflecting of pairings and voids through the dense visual language of solid cast hydrocal. In addressing ideas of desperate preservation, paradoxically, her work emphasizes opposing ideas of voids, removal, and form succumbing to weight, breakage, monotony, and weathering. Forms that carry quietness, subtlety, and weight show the daily additions, relentless consistency, and mass of voids -where they share similarities, where one affects the other, and to what extent does each exist. The slow build of these forms both preserves and asserts their agency while barely being present. Her focus on the compulsive and continually unchanging reality of voids, and the comfortable quietness of their daily and long-term existence.

Read on to discover what brought Hayden to the medium, her creative process, and latest collection To Live With. 

Can you please begin by briefly introducing yourself and what led you into working with ceramics?

Hayden: Originally from Columbus, Ohio, I began doing ceramics in high school. I went to undergraduate school in Detroit at the College for Creative Studies and to graduate school at Cranbrook Academy of Art. When I first started CCS, my major was in Crafts with an emphasis on metals. However, by my second year, I had reverted to my home material and switched my focus back to ceramics. I liked learning about ways of working with metal, but it just was not for me, and even though I was switching back to a pretty polarly different material, I like to think that I carried some principles of metal with me back to clay -infusing clay pieces with the sort of rigidity and structure that perhaps is more inherent with metal. At grad school at Cranbrook, there was such a rich design history and legacy there, that even though I was in the Ceramics program, toward the end of my second year, I began to scale up works into furniture. I became much more interested in creating spaces and translating my ideas of objects and sculpture into more relational forms of furniture.

Do you have any philosophies attached to your craft? How important do you see the act of creating handmade goods in this day and age?

H: My work has always been my way of better understanding myself and my world around me. It is self-reflective, and the physical act of making has always been a part of this. It is “sense-making” work. Perhaps because, to me, my works are sculptural expressions, and the expression often comes before the function. Me making them is integral. I love the sincerity that comes with the handmade and the honesty of a material like clay. Clay itself has memory and you can see touch embedded in it. It is a very slow process, and it does require a lot of discipline and craft, but I often work with such a restrained visual vocabulary, that the craft of the pieces is not usually front and center, but rather inherently part of them. When I surround myself with works that are hand-made, I feel more fulfilled and my setting feels richer. Hand-made objects have such a power to help create, reflect, and inform your space and identity, that I think slowing down and relating to them is a very special practice.

Can you please introduce your latest collection, To Live With. What is the concept behind the collection and what do you want people to do or feel when they encounter your pieces?

H: My interest lies in the preservation of stark weight, mass, and their sculptural convergence into furniture. Emphasizing opposing ideas of gradual growth and weathering, my works often present a slow storyline along an almost tectonically scaled timeline -one of quiet, humble, and earnest growth. Methods of stacking convey the timeline of their build and development that have been calcified in a moment. The To Live With Series is a series that examines what it means to physically choose to live with weight in a way of gentle quiet function and daily interaction -what it looks like when ideas of weight become land-like markers in a domestic landscape. I think a lot about the physical feelings of loss, and how that can be tangible. How absence can have weight and take up space, and the physical entanglement of weight into time. They are quiet pieces, and my aim is often to do the most with the least possible -to distil down to simple notions. When making, there are a few principle words and phrases that are drum beats in my head that are typically the main focus of the work and guide me. I regularly ask myself, “what does it look like to fall apart?” And when I first started asking this, for myself at least, I realized that to fall apart, in the instance of loss, was not a chaotic spinning out, but rather a very slow build and mass accumulation of absence. With this in mind, I always refer to ideas of weathering and even the monotony and repetition of the mass of weight and the space that absence and loss can take up. There is a bit of quiet uncertainty, and maybe even somberness, that I aim for.

What is the process for creating one of your pieces? To what extent do you plan your designs and to what extent are they the result of natural chances?

H: With clay exclusive pieces, because building with clay on a large scale requires planning in order to build it just so that it will survive, those pieces are pretty locked in my mind as to what they are going to be. With other pieces, however, there are material interactions, so there is a conversation that can happen. I enjoy the story that materials can create between each other, and the responses or even contradictions from one material to another. For me, there is often a process of setting up scenarios in order to respond to later. That may be something like casting a glass component and responding to it by completing the form with a clay component. When I use multiple materials, like clay and plaster and glass, I like their differences to be more subtle, rather than used for a stark contrast. I enjoy the tonal changes they have and they work together or speak to each other.

Your work has a very strong theme yet it seems organic - how do you balance evolving your work whilst maintaining the integrity of your style?

H: There is a part of me that is not too calculated about this, in the sense that, if I am the one making the work and it is well done and original and it aligns with the ideas that I am trying to communicate, the works should inherently have my style and speak my design language. Oftentimes, the more you explore an idea, the more specific you get about it, so you begin to establish certain rules or criteria for your visual language that always show up in the work.

Where do you draw your inspiration from?

H: I think a lot topographically about things like the salt flats. Places where patterns and rhythms exist to create gradual changes over a long period of time. With movements and changes being gradual, time is drawn out and experience is elongated into a mundane repetition. Time folds in on itself and the sense of place and timelines can become blurred. It is this uncertainty in beginning, middle and end and sense of “un-placeability” that intrigues me.

How would you describe the creative scene in Detroit, Michigan? And how does it impact your own work?

H: Detroit is definitely a maker’s place. For so long it was an industrial city, so it has got such good bones because the infrastructure of manufacturing is there. There is every type of local fabrication business or specialty material business. There’s also space. There is potential for makers to own their own studios or buildings, which is pretty rare in a lot of places, and an incredible resource to have.

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