A translucent cast resin head changes scale with whatever light lands on it. A gazing globe built from radio parts receives wind, weather, landscape, whoever walks past its reflective curvature. That receiving is not passivity. It’s their life, and their life is their defense: sacred by way of being an artwork on earth — as ours are. What they offer isn't argued for. It's divined — as water is found by someone who needs it, hopefully. The position I work from is first build precisely, then let go. Bronze, resin, aluminum, fiberglass, hand-blown glass — engineered, cast, and blown with fabricators and glassblowers I work with closely; the collaboration is part of the work, not a footnote. I also work very alone: models, clays, fibers and looms, what's grown in my garden, decades of drawing. The object passes through other hands and other kinds of expertise before it meets weather and chance. Chime, mandala, talisman — the words I keep for my work come from ancient instruments of divining, and I use them metaphorically, with precision. Each names a form built with total exactness so that something beyond it can move through: the mandala's geometry is drawn precisely so attention can pour through it, the talisman is made — carved, cast, charged — to hold a power it doesn't generate alone; the chime is tuned, then offered to other forces. My idea of a chime goes further, it does something with the wind and stays its own. My object has no self set apart from what moves through it. It becomes what changes it. But the letting go happens inside me, not to the object. I release the work to wind, rain, and season — I don’t abandon it. My objects are cherished. They exist inside care, not neglect; they were never built to become ruins, and care is what they need in order to exist at all. People have tended my landscapes and terrariums for decades — the tending is inside the work, not incidental to it. Held completely and released completely, at once: both sides of being human. That, I believe, is what we are dying to become. This is openness as a precision methodology — every exactness in the making exists for the release, and the release lands in other hands. I trace that stance to Casual Ceremonies, the 1991 group show Bill Arning curated at White Columns — a title I've kept ever since. Ceremony is the seriousness of making: real attention, real precision, real risk. Casual is my refusal to let that seriousness harden into a position I have to defend. My work touches several lineages and sits inside none of them — land art's inseparability of sculpture and site, at the scale of a rooftop or a mansion garden; Agnes Denes's conviction that cultivation can be the art itself; glass and acrylic as vessels for light, mineral, and growth; the gazing globe and gnome reclaimed from kitsch as symbols carrying real weight. Not settling is the method. Since the early 1990s — Fawbush Gallery, solo shows at MoMA, the Wexner Center, The Tang Museum, Marianne Boesky Gallery, Salon 94, permanent commissions including Caves and Minds at Crystal Bridges and the pollinator garden at Lyndhurst — I've treated museum grounds and gallery interiors as sites for work built to be lived in by time, weather, and other people's care, not protected from them.

Exhibitions and Commissions

Caves and Minds

10' H x 24' W x 2'10" D
Cast fiberglass, hand-blown glass, specimen crystals
Permanent commission
Caves and Minds was made for one of the museum's great interstitial zones — a space awarded through the museum's public art initiative, Art Everywhere. It sits near the entrance to Crystal Bridges' Contemporary American Art Gallery, close to the bridge that carries artwork, craft, and the museum's own Holy Grail Crystal.
The quartz comes from the Ouachita Mountains, among the clearest crystal deposits in the world. Dozens of clear quartz wands are arranged inside five hand-blown glass vessels — micro-landscapes nested within a larger landscape of seven crystal specimens gathered from around the country, including a Herkimer diamond set in roughly 500-million-year-old dolomite from near my family's land in Upstate New York, alongside Wavellite and Dragon Scale Calcite.
The piece works through the same dialectic as the rest of my practice: exacting technical control, handed to conditions no one controls.
Getting the light right, in a room full of daylight, took real time — working with Linnaea Tillett Lighting Design Associates, we tested approach after approach until we found something soft enough that the fiberglass itself seems to hold and glow, washing over glass and crystal rather than striking them. That precision exists for one purpose: to be surrendered to whatever the room's actual daylight does on a given afternoon. The crystal was pulled from the ground; the fiberglass was engineered and cast by fabricators I worked with closely to get exactly this effect. Both are handed, finally, to weather and to the visitor passing through — the industrial and the geologic, sitting inside the same object without either one apologizing for the other.
At the center, within a lit dome, sits a piece of Peacock Ore, the Stone of Joy — a stone that formed in total darkness, brought into a museum built almost entirely of light.
Paula Hayes Garden at The Overlook, Lyndhurst Mansion, Tarrytown, NY

Lyndhurst Mansion, Tarrytown, New York, 2025–26
Pollinator garden, three Gazing Globes, Lyndhurst Purple tinted birdbath, bronze Gnome sculpture
For the surrounds of the 2025–26 renovation of the Overlook viewing platform at Lyndhurst Mansion, I made a mandala-shaped pollinator garden with three Gazing Globes, a Lyndhurst Purple tinted birdbath, and a bronze Gnome.
Andrew Moore, a longtime colleague and landscape architect at Quennell Rothschild & Partners, worked with me on the planting plan. The palette leans on native grasses — Blonde Ambition blue grama, Northwind switchgrass, Standing Ovation little bluestem — moving through the mandala in bands, with purple coneflower and bluestar amsonia bringing in the color pollinators are actually looking for, and a low run of white clover underneath.
The Gazing Globe and the garden gnome are not ornaments here — they are symbols, inherited from a garden tradition that treats them as kitsch, deployed with the same seriousness as any bronze on a pedestal. The globes are built from cast-off radio parts and repurposed polycarbonate: objects that don't create an image so much as become whatever arrives at them — light, weather, a passerby's reflection, for as long as that thing is there. The bronze Gnome works the dialectic from the other direction: a symbol built for permanence, returned to a place where it will be rained on, walked past, weathered. Both, along with the birdbath, are colored to sit inside the grasses and coneflowers rather than stand apart from them — not camouflage, but tuning sculpture and meadow to the same register.
Helen Gould planted her own rose garden at Lyndhurst in the early 1900s — a circle of some 500 roses, originally shades of pink only. She was, by the account of those who knew her, devoted to flowers and horticulture. This garden takes up that devotion and answers it from another century, with instruments — the globe, the gnome — that could not have existed for her, and materials she would not have recognized as garden materials at all. It is a continuation of her care for this site, made in a vocabulary only available a hundred years later.
Giant Crystal Terrariums at Cristina Grajales Gallery, New York, NY

60" H x 10" W, hand-blown glass, shredded rubber, glitter, sand substrate, specimen crystals
These are terrariums created for gazing rather than growing — tall glass vessels holding no living plant, rather strata of sand, shredded rubber, glitter, and specimen crystals gathered near the top like something set on an altar. I think of them as shrines built from the same impulse that makes anyone collect: the wish to gather what catches you and keep it somewhere you can return to. The terrarium itself was an accidental invention — a London physician sealed a fern spore in a glass bottle in 1829 hoping to hatch a moth, and found the fern thrived in air that would have killed it outside, in soot-choked London. What he'd built without meaning to was a kind of womb made of glass, carrying life through conditions it couldn't survive in the open. By 1851 one of his cases sat inside the Crystal Palace, a plant alive after eighteen years without water, on display in a building made entirely of iron and glass. It was a shrine to what the era had made, and also, quietly, to what the era feared — marvel and dread arriving together, inseparable.
The Victorians gazed into crystal too, in a different register — crystal balls and scrying mirrors had real vogue, tied to a hope that looking long enough into something clear might show you another world. I don't think that impulse ever left; it just changed instruments. A telescope pointed at the galaxy is a kind of crystal gazing, and I think of my gazing globes the same way — chimes as much as mirrors, open forms built to catch whatever moves through them without insisting on what they should receive. Giving up that insistence is its own kind of loss of control, close to what the Victorians felt reaching for their machines and their séances in the same breath. Something in us keeps wanting an intermediary — glass, crystal, machine — that can carry us a little further than we can go alone. The materials underneath these crystals don't hide what era made them: shredded rubber and glitter sit in the sand like sediment, industrial residue standing in for geologic time, fear sitting honestly next to the specimens rather than smoothed away. Underneath that, something more stubborn — the pull to gather and arrange anyway, even in a glass that holds no plant at all. The undefended object here is a bare stone, given nothing to justify itself but the light that finds it and the attention of whoever stops to look.
The Campus, Second Annual Exhibition- 2025

I carefully joined together my cast bronze, aluminum, fiberglass, hand blown glass, and EPDM rubber sculptures with the soil, insects, and wildness in the 1951 modernist upstate NY high school atrium. I got to know the space slowly, and gardened the wild space for the duration of the exhibition (June - October 2025).
Canoes

Canoes, 2016, Seagram Building, NYC, powder coated aluminum, stainless steel, live planting, lighting
Trees For ETs

Art Omi, The Fields, Ghent, NY, 2008-2013
The E (exuberant) is for the dogs and children who could see my artwork made for the Terrestrial wanderers.
The adult humans saw a messy field I think: Uncut grass, freely flopping flowers, sparkles of glittering glass, and blob forms with weeping evergreens and wily vines.
The affection I feel for freedom to grow as you are is my approach to a gardens, with minimal cutting or intervention. It’s not that I don’t plan on doing anything at all, in a lot of ways it’s harder to have this kind of garden. Socially it is, indeed. It’s about timing (intervening minimally at the right time), and paying close attention, being very patient (because you will fail at some things and will need to transform and begin again) and be a deep editor in order to stay committed. I have proven in my life this is all possible.
Gazing Globes

Madison Square Park, NYC, 2012, Polycarbonate, silicone, fiberglass, radio transistor parts, glitter
Land Mind

Lever House, NYC, 2012
Cast acrylic, salt water aquarium with tropical fish and plants, filtration system. silicone planters tropical planting, recycled rubber flooring
Land Mind

Lever House, NYC, 2012,
Cast acrylic, salt water aquarium with tropical fish and plants, filtration system. silicone planters tropical planting, recycled rubber flooring
Paula Hayes/Solo Exhibition

Wexner Center For the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, 2011
Paula Hayes/Solo Exhibition

Wexner Center For the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, 2011
Wexner Center For the Arts Roof Garden

2011, sedum, grasses, and evergreen shrubs in planters
Nocturne of the Limax Maximus

Museum of Modern Art, NYC, 2010
Inspired by the dance of hermaphroditic slugs in the forest at night, two electrically lit plantings encased in curvy plastic pods were cared for in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art as folks passed through.
Understory

Tang Museum, 2010, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY
A series of ten dinners and talks in the museum, set amongst living art works cared by Skidmore students over the course of 10 months.
Understory

Tang Museum, 2010, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY
A series of ten dinners and talks in the museum, set amongst living art works cared by Skidmore students over the course of 10 months.
Understory

Tang Museum, 2010, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY
A series of ten dinners and talks in the museum, set amongst living art works cared by Skidmore students over the course of 10 months.
Spells, 2019-2023

Notational, 2023, Bill Arning Exhibitions, Kinderhook, NY, John Hatfield, Paula Hayes, Robin Kahn
Comets, 2022

Via Lactea, 2022, Cristina Grajales Gallery, NYC