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courtesy Metal Museum
White Torus
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courtesy Metal Museum
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courtesy Metal Museum
Wads
Through decades of working with metal as a blacksmith, fabricator, artist-in-residence, and instructor, Kansas-born sculptor Hoss Haley has honed his skills — enough to have been named 2016 Master Metalsmith, a distinction given by the Metal Museum in Memphis. But perhaps one of the most important lessons he’s learned: Sometimes you must unlearn.
In a video viewable at the Master Metalsmith: Hoss Haley exhibition currently showing at the Metal Museum, Haley compares the artists’ ideal process to children stacking blocks — as they’re building a tower, kids don’t question how high it’ll go: “That’s not on their mind; they’re just responding. And I think we learn our way out of that, and we learn that everything we do has to be with certain intention,” he says. “The goal is to kind of get back to that and say . . . ‘Now I need to get out of the way and let it do what it’s going to do.’ I think there’s a lot [to be said] about just getting out of your own way.”
On an early November Friday, as Haley drives from his North Carolina home near the Penland School of Crafts to Charlotte to prepare for the dedication of his recently installed public art piece at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport, we further the conversation about the importance of artists — and people, in general — rediscovering some of that childlike freedom and wonder, the ability to create without judgment. “Unfortunately, in the process of learning skills we also learn judgment, and we decide ‘this is good and this isn’t.’ You only have to see the work of a child who has none of that to realize how important it is.”
And that voice is still there, in all of us, “but we’ve suppressed it for various reasons,” says Haley. “I feel like I’ve spent the past several years trying to pay more attention to that voice and not override itby intellect.”
Learning skills, techniques, and history is crucial — “all of that is important,” he says, “but what it really comes down to is an ability to finally learn how to edit and know when to let go.” This “letting go” can be seen in pieces from Haley’s “White Series” (a selection from this series is currently on view at the Metal Museum), where the artist ultimately had to yield to the materials used — to the way the repurposed metal bent and formed under the weight of his hydraulic press and tools — which led him on a path of discovery.
Learning and Unlearning
Hoss Haley's colleague, Justin Turcotte, using a custom-built "wad" press
Born in 1961 in rural Kansas, Haley grew up on a family farm. The type of kid who liked to take clocks and radios apart to see the inner workings, he says, “I was messing around with things I probably shouldn’t have — electricity and stuff — when I was quite young.” While his parents may have had their worries, they certainly didn’t discourage his curiosity. “Luckily I didn’t burn the barn down,” he laughs, remembering the experimentation he’d do in the hay barn, taking things apart, reconfiguring them, and plugging them in.
As for making things, he recalls first learning how to craft things out of wood with a hammer and saw, but found woodworking to be limiting and “a little frustrating.” His father had a shop on the farm, complete with welding equipment, and as young as 6 or 7 years old, Haley would strap on a welding helmet and watch his father work. “As soon as I could get my hands on that and actually weld, by the time I was maybe 12, I was off and running,” he says. “First I learned to drill a hole so I could drill holes in metal and bolt things together, and that was much more satisfying.”
Starting around junior high, Haley was constantly creating: small crafts made welding nails and bits of metal together, windmills, figures of guys on motorcycles or horses. But many of his early pieces were “just contraptions,” he says. “I remember I made a sled that could be pulled behind a pickup truck in the wintertime. We didn’t have any hills in Kansas, so it was a big thing to just get an old car hood and tie it behind a pickup truck and drive that around out in the pasture. So, of course, I had to build my own version of that. This was probably high school, but we would pull each other around at high speeds; there may have been some broken bones.”
Car hoods, which were a small stepping stone in his metalworking as a teen, became a source of learning and inspiration for more recent work, Wads, a collection of crumpled, paper-like, metal balls that can be seen in his “White Series.” As shown in the exhibit’s accompanying video, Haley scavenged scrap metal from junkyard cars, pulling off gas caps from old Mercedes and Fords for color samples. The hoods of those that fit into the gradated color scheme were removed and formed, with a custom-built (by the artist) hydraulic press and various tools, into “wads,” an atypical approach to metalsmithing art.
While the scrap yard had been a source of raw material and inspiration for Haley for decades, he’d typically make the trek with a specific part or a particular type of metal in mind for a project. He noticed he’d begun stepping over and pushing through more throwaway materials than what he considered quality, usable parts. Gone were the leftovers of 1990s industrial manufacturing and the structural steel of the 2000s building boom. Much of what Haley began seeing was discarded appliances. In an artist statement regarding the “White Series,” Haley says, “I’ve learned that materials that I might initially deem undesirable can actually be worth trying, so I occasionally pick up something to test in the studio. Once in a while, something has unexpected potential and can influence what I make as well as how I make it.” This unlikely material led to a breakthrough and an initially unintentional artistic response to his junkyard finds.
Haley developed a quick process for stripping the skins off washers and dryers and began experimenting with them in his press. The natural movement of the white metal shaped the pieces, both literally and conceptually. From his artist statement: “I liked the way the metal crumpled under the pressure of the press; it reminded me of paper. I started thinking about how we tend to buy things with little thought of the future. We can buy appliances and electronics so cheaply that when they break, we toss them and go get new ones. It is like writing on a piece of paper, changing your mind, wadding it up, tossing it away, and starting again.” This became the vision of Wads.
He continued making more of the round, rumpled forms, letting them collect in his studio “the way crumpled paper collects around a trash bin or the washing machines were collecting in the scrap yard,” he adds. “The final composition, Cycle, became a way to exaggerate the idea of ‘tossing away’ and to demonstrate the precariousness of this act. In the end there was a satisfying moment in the process when the castoffs became commentary.”
Other pieces in the “White Series” — including Glacier and Tessellation No. 1 — also speak to the disposable, material nature of today’s society. Glacier, a cluster of distorted, white appliance skins, mimics the appearance of an ice formation. The commentary on the throwaway nature of society comes full circle here, shining an angled, junk-metal light on the effect this type of lifestyle has on the environment via a warming climate melting glaciers. The 1,000-pound behemoth Tessellation towers above the viewer, its bulbous curves appearing to be shrinkwrapped as a result of the artist’s metal application process, perhaps ready to be opened and thrown away.
A Conversation Piece
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courtesy Metal Museum
Round Coil
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courtesy of Hoss Haley
Red & White Wad
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courtesy of Metal Museum
Detail of Glacier
Having grown up tinkering in his father’s shop, spending time racing motocross, learning machining and fabrication at an early age, and studying blacksmithing for many years in Texas and New Mexico, Haley developed a connection to machines. That relationship between the artist and the process’ moving parts, he says, becomes part of an abstract conversation.
Sometimes the art will give its own instructions. “Metal has characteristics; thick metal behaves differently than thin metal,” says Haley. “It’s the sound it makes, the way it yields to the tools; and it’s all very distinct to that particular metal whether it’s aluminum or bronze or steel or stainless steel, so it’s bringing its own history and behavior to the table. It’s my job, I think, to understand that as well as I can.”
As a result of this attempt at understanding, Haley must sometimes adjust his process. An example was the experimentation with scrapped washing machines. “As a metalworker and a craftsman, the thing a person would try to do would be to control the metal in such a way that it doesn’t wrinkle. But in this case, I found myself needing to step back and allow that to happen. There’s a surface tension that’s made more obvious by all those wrinkles and that’s all just discovery,” he says. “The only way for me to get that is to step back enough and allow the material to have its own voice, and that’s where it really does feel like a conversation because I’m not fully in control.”
Tools work similarly. Each has its own characteristics and capabilities, which can often be limiting. So Haley makes or modifies many of his tools, a habit he picked up as a boy. At a young age, he says, “I played a lot with Tinker Toys, but I was never satisfied with using them in their applied state. Invariably, I’d end up cutting parts and glueing parts; I always had a need to take it a bit further, and I’ve carried that through.”
Haley compares this need to make or modify his own tools to a musician who’s made his own guitar. In doing so, the musician will develop a deeper relationship with his instrument. “Maybe there’s a tone you’re after that you can’t get from a guitar off the shelf,” he says. When working with metal, it can be a certain shape the artist is after, one that hasn’t previously existed in the world or one for which the proper tools have not been developed to create. Or it can be an answer to more practical problems.
For the enormous, 40-foot tall, 40,000-pound sculpture installed in the plaza of the Charlotte Douglas International Airport, a Cor-ten steel piece titled Old Growth that was designed with overlapping, stacked-block branches to evoke the presence of a tree, Haley built a welding machine to simplify the crafting process, which required 1,500 feet of weld. He found that to do the welding with conventional tools was going to take more time than he had allowed.
“We ended up building a machine that was adapted from another machine that did cutting,” he says. “We were able to get such a nice result that we didn’t have to do any grinding, and it became the difference between making money on that project and losing money.
“There’s this kind of constant adaptation,” Haley says. “If I’m not making the tools from scratch, it’s modifying something to work a little differently, and that becomes part of the conversation as well.”
In addition to deciphering the language of the materials and tools he uses, Haley has had to find his own voice. After apprenticing as a blacksmith for several years, he had to change directions. “The thing about an apprenticeship is you learn to be that other person’s hand,” he says. “And after that amount of time, I struggled with my own identity as a maker, what my voice was.” Ultimately, Haley turned his focus to sculpture, toward fabrication and away from forging.
For works like the Drawing Machine, a device equipped with linear actuators controlled by sensors or computer commands that affect the path of a stylus, Haley incorporated more modern technologies. The machine produces generated drawings — on paper or painted metal surfaces — reminiscent of the geometric designs created by the children’s toy, the Spirograph. (An example of this can be seen in Long Pi, currently on view in the Metal Museum gallery.) While Haley claims to have a bit of a love/hate relationship with technology and is leery of it “having too strong a voice,” he says, he tries to “work with it in a way where I’m sort of pushing its boundaries.
“It’s just a way of trying to avoid that complacency of working solely within what the available technology offers. When you experiment there’s always discovery.”
The Balancing Act
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courtesy Metal Museum
Tessellation No.1
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courtesy Metal Museum
Stack No.1
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courtesy Metal Museum
Pulled Coil
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courtesy Metal Museum
Erratic Union No.2
Alongside a full-time art career, Haley has held more than 30 positions as artist-in-residence, keynote speaker, instructor, and presenter at universities, symposiums, and conferences across the country. Teaching and residencies is what brought him to North Carolina. He, his wife, and 9-year-old son lived in Asheville before a recent move closer to Penland, where his wife — an artist, designer, and educator — is director of programs.
A master of creating two- and three-dimensional works in steel, concrete, and bronze, Haley has been commissioned to create several large public art pieces, including installations for the Pack Square Conservancy (Asheville), Valdosta State University (Valdosta, Georgia), Charlotte Area Transit System, South Corridor Light Rail (Charlotte, North Carolina), Sam Houston State University (Huntsville, Texas), and elsewhere. Ideally, that type of work “feeds work that’s more personal, more for my own motivation and exploration,” says Haley.
“To make a living as a sculptor, there’s a bit of compromise,” he says, noting that he makes some functional work — tables he’s designed — for a company in Asheville. “I do a little of that to keep the bills paid and to buy myself time to experiment and to make new work.”
Since Haley, in recent years, has moved away from more traditional metalworking, it came as a bit of a surprise to him to be given the Metal Museum’s distinction of Master Metalsmith. According to the Museum, the Master Metalsmith series began in 1984 as a way to honor the most influential artists of the day and has brought more than 30 internationally acclaimed metalsmiths to Memphis for solo exhibitions.
Selection is based on suggestions made by a committee of metalsmiths during the Museum’s repair days, with an aim to highlight a person who’s making strides in the field. Many of those given the title have created more functional or decorative work, showcasing different skillsets, leaning more on the side of casting and forging.
“It probably offends some people who think it’s sort of blasphemous to not get things hot and hit them with a hammer,” Haley says. “I love forging, but my practice has taken me somewhere else. It was double the honor that I was being recognized, thinking that I probably moved too far away from my roots.”
While the “White Series” specifically, with its use of recycled washers and dryers, may have moved further away from traditional metalsmithing, other works in Haley’s current Metal Museum exhibition represent a variety of metalworking skills with pieces from his “Coils,” “Erratics,” “Torics,” “Spheres,” and “Ripples” series. And his work, at minimum, makes us rethink what metal can do and say.
With “Coils,” large slabs of manipulated steel resemble curled ribbons or chocolate shavings. Elements of the larger sculptures in “Erratics” are meant to echo the form of glacial erratics, large boulders that have been carried far away from their original landscape as a result of glacial movements. By stacking these roundish, rock-like forms with rectilinear steel blocks, the finished product appears both balanced and off-kilter.
Haley states his intention was “that the relationship of these disparate elements be perceived as completely natural and settled while simultaneously suggesting that they might collapse at any moment.”
The “Erratics” pieces, much like life, suggest a need for balance. As Haley nears his destination, driving into Charlotte, he tells me he’s touching on that subject in his talk at the Old Growth dedication ceremony, quoting from a passage written by a nurse who’d spoken to people in their last days about their biggest regrets. “The main one is not leading an authentic life and pursuing your dreams,” he says. “And of course after that is not spending enough time with your family and working too much — so you’ve got to balance it out.”
Haley is thankful to be able to strike that balance and continue to do what he loves — create. “It’s its own kind of therapy,” he says. “I think people probably have an image of artists going into the studio, whether they’re a painter or whatever, and it’s just this kind of automatic thing, but it’s a lot more than that. It’s frustrating sometimes and it brings up all the emotions, but there are those nuggets.
“I was working on a piece recently where I got into that state of literally losing track of time and not wanting to stop for lunch and then saying, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll just work a little bit longer.’ That’s a rare state. A lot of the time it’s just like work, but to get to that place, it’s all worth it.”
The Metal Museum’s “Master Metalsmith: Hoss Haley” exhibition runs through December 30, 2016.
