Poetics of
Possibility

“I ask myself what it can mean to care for and remain attentive in life and in painting—and is this the same thing?” says Jodi Hays, whose mixed media pieces collage cardboard, foil, paper, fabric, and other found items into patchwork explorations of texture and color. She combines an interest in art history and traditional methods of preparing surfaces—such as using rabbit glue to size fabric—with everyday materials like packaging, ribbons, or household textiles, exploring the histories implied in specific patterns and associations. “I collect material from friends, family members, thrift stores, estate sales, trash, and recycle bins,” she says. “Cardboard and found textiles have their own history that is also a material for the work. I suppose there is a pragmatism to selecting these materials… [they] feel like where I am from, Arkansas: underestimated and beautiful.”

Hays’s works defy easy categorization, existing between assemblage, painting, and sometimes sculpture. The patchwork motif pays homage to domestic experience and women’s labor especially, influenced by members of her own family. “My great-grandmother was many things, including a milliner,” she says. “The patchworks are certainly an homage to her and a larger community of southern quilt-makers, but also to artists like Robert Rauschenberg [in his] use of humble materials and the abstract collages of Lee Krasner and Romare Bearden.” While she doesn’t formally sew, Hays describes a capability to “make do” when it comes to stitching pieces in a pinch, and is interested in the relationship between the historically gendered tasks of mending or working with textiles, especially in the home.

Hays ascribes her work to the legacies of genres like narrative, history, and landscape painting, but avoids labeling her own work with any specificity, preferring to allow the process and language to remain malleable and absorptive. “I locate my work within the history of abstraction, but came to it through figuration and the genre of landscape,” she explains. “This might be related to a deep sense of my inhabited world growing up—fields, reforesting, cutover, cross country running, art history in books, Sunday painting… However, patchwork quilts look like aerial landscapes and fields. It was not my intention to make work that presents such an easy metaphor. Mine are more habits (running in a field), associations (small town architecture), tendencies (spare).”

Find more of Hays’s work on her website and Instagram.

All images © Jodi Hays. Photographs by Sam Angel Photography and Marten Elder/Night Gallery.