Paula Hayes at Salon 94

"Forest" was conceptual artist and gardener Paula Hayes's first show in New York since 1997. Hayes works in many mediums, including landscape and garden design, sculpture, performance and drawing. She has been privately commissioned to execute gardens in Germany, France and New York and, in fact, created one for Salon 94, which can usually be seen beyond the gallery's wall of windows but was unfortunately obscured by snowfall during my visit. Having grown up on a family farm in upstate New York, where corn, hay and potatoes were cultivated, she is committed to elaborating and strengthening the relationship between nature and civilized society.

Eccentrically enough, but with a telling ecological intelligence, in 1999 Hayes devised a contraption for wearing a plant on the body, much as an infant is carried about by its mother. The plant, usually a cactus, potato plant or fern, is secured by a felt strap with a base; tubes allow the soil to drain water. The idiosyncrasy of the idea is offset by the gentle pleasure afforded by holding something living, and it underlines Hayes's strong belief in the meaningfulness of ties between plants and people.

Recently Hayes has more exclusively devoted herself to gardens, and this show was an exercise in developing her interest indoors. For it, the artist planted living specimens--artworks in their own right--in silicone and blown-glass vessels with open tops, which take on esthetic qualities aligned with the growing things within (all works 2003-04). The exhibition included 15 such vessels (Hayes works closely with the glassblowers who fabricate them), which are rounded and organic in shape; the plants grown inside include miniature elm trees and clover. Five larger containers are made of a malleable silicone that changes shape as roots spread; inside are tropical fig and date trees and bamboo. Hayes also included a small terrarium enclosed within a womb-shaped glass vessel, onto whose surface, magically enough, water gathers above the plants and rains down upon them. The installation created an interior garden both quirky and beautiful.

Hayes also included three very large (90 by 60 inches) drawings (in pencil, marker, glitter and glue), mythical in feeling, which she here installed against a preexisting wallpaper with botanical motifs. Goddesslike female figures are seen in an environment of abstract ornament. Vaguely poetic phrases, such as "ice mirrors" and "stars glowing brightly," are written across the center of the compositions. Hayes considers the drawings, like the rest of the show, to be gardens of sorts, in this case fantasies that may one day have a concrete realization. For Hayes, the garden has become an all-encompassing metaphor for a life of plenitude.

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