Erica Cheung: Your practice draws from a rich roster of different artists and mediums. I've heard you reference painters, sculptors, architects, and artists working with stained glass. But throughout all of this, your career has foregrounded textiles and fibers as the main materials with which you channel these references. Why are you drawn to working with textiles, specifically at a large scale? 

Rachel Hayes: I was originally drawn to the textile medium because it seemed like something I could handle on my own. When I first started using fabric, I dyed and painted it, working with color like I was a painter. When weaving, I would dye the warp and weft; when papermaking, I dyed paper with indigo. I also collected other influences while learning these technical processes. As a student in the ‘90s, there were only a handful of textile artists referenced in my art history books, and so I was attracted to the artwork that museums around me—the Kemper Museum, the Nelson Museum, the Atkins Museum—had readily accessible. Because of this, my visual image bank includes many artists outside of my medium: Frank Stella, Dale Chihuly, Robert Rauschenberg, and more.  

Scale became a way to voice my ambition without having to explicitly state it. I liked how it made me feel, and I liked how it surprised my fellow students and viewers. Using the processes and materials at my disposal, I learned how to sew smaller pieces together to make something giant. I was very into the idea of creating work that was patterned all over, like a Jackson Pollock—no central motif to focus on, each piece of the canvas equally touched. This was coupled with learning about historical textile processes, pattern making, and wallpapers, which got me thinking about scale in more of a design sense.

EC: Your project with Black Cube, Horizon Drift, is certainly informed by these multimedia foundations. What was the process of adapting your practice to Denver’s Plaza of the Americas like? How did the site shape your installation? 

RH: When Cortney (Black Cube’s Executive Director + Chief Curator) first presented the idea of responding to the Plaza, we had a great discussion about how to have a visual impact on the space. When I first started making drawings, I worked as if there were no limitations, because I knew I had the support of Black Cube to help me figure things out. 

From there, tailoring to the site began. You find out what you can and cannot do—what are the constraints, and what can we take advantage of in the space? There were a lot of “no’s” along the way, but in the end, I feel like that only gave me more clarity on what needed to happen. Earlier sketches started much higher—towards the top of the surrounding buildings—and then we came down to a more human scale. I realized there was an opportunity for shadow play and reflections on the ground if we went lower, especially given the materials on the nearby buildings and the corridor they create. Horizon Drift ended up being in the right spot for light play; it was like how if you want to light something on fire with a magnifying glass in the sun, you have to put it in just the right spot. 

EC: If you’re rushing through the Plaza, it's easy to gloss over your surroundings and treat the space as a passageway. Horizon Drift interrupts this, calling attention to everything around it. 

Speaking of calling attention—during the opening for the project, you were out in the Plaza, demonstrating your making process with your sewing machine. Visitors really seemed to love this moment of getting to lift the curtain and see behind the scenes. What made you want to be out there and engage with the community in this way? 

RH: I get a lot of questions about materials, and I know from experience that people like to touch the art. It gives them a better understanding of what they're looking at, and shows them that this is something that you can feel and make yourself. Textiles gives off a familiarity; I wanted to lean into this and be generous with the process. Everyone sees textiles out in our world all the time, and I hope that seeing me work will help make people more aware of textiles’ presence. 

I also wanted to bring my sewing machine to the site, because you must be prepared for anything when you're working at the scale of Horizon Drift. Whether this means putting a last-minute patch on something, or something having to be hemmed one inch shorter, knowing that there’s nothing I can’t fix or alter makes me feel better. 

EC: Because your works are often temporary, documentation of them through photography and video are crucial for your archives. But at the same time, you have mentioned that sometimes folks look at these images and think that they’re AI-generated because of how polished they are. I'm curious how you, as a physical maker in a very, very digital age, are thinking about this tension between being engaged in such manual processes, but also needing to be present in the virtual realm. 

RH: I remember the first time I took photos of a site on film, got that film digitized on a CD, and then used a computer to draw on the images to help get a proposal idea across. I still love to take photographs of my works to document them, and I still use these images for proposals to help visualize what my pieces might look like in a different space. I've never thought of the images themselves as art; to me, they’re a tool. 

Someone did tell me that some of the things I present look like they could be made with AI. While looking at digitally created imagery on a screen might be enough for some, I still really love the idea of ‘let’s make this happen in real life.’ What’s weird is to be translating works from your imagination into reality, and to then potentially have them regurgitated back to you by an algorithm that doesn't know how they're physically made, or what the material is. It's a lot to consider, and I haven't really thought through it all yet.

EC: Can you describe the process of composing and putting together the individual panels that make up Horizon Drift? 

RH: There are five panels total. The first one I made was one of the biggest, and it has a lot of tan, orange, yellow, and white. It’s almost like I was a little hesitant with it, but that's okay—because if all five gestures were the same, then it would be a cacophony. If one is more subtle, another can be bolder; they can play off each other. The first panel I made is more broken up, whereas the last one has a more distinct, bull’s eye pattern that hints at Frank Stella’s concentric squares. Each panel is a drift, a movement. 

I wanted Horizon Drift to feel purposeful and like it's meant to be there. I wanted it to feel like a singular art gesture, a moment of sculpture where every angle is meant to be. I wanted it to be “viewable in the round,” to use an architecture term. 

EC: What do you hope visitors learn or gain from seeing Horizon Drift? 

RH: That there are so many ways to experience and think about it. I love when you can see the sky or the surrounding buildings through it. Each panel is made from materials that allow all different kinds of weather—rain, snow, sun—to pass through, meaning that the installation changes all the time. My hope is that Horizon Drift visually jars people just enough to notice their surroundings—the reflections, the colors, the buildings—and think about them differently.