Sarah Kelleher appraises James L Hayes’ project ‘The Score’, which addresses the culture and sporting tradition
of Irish road bowling
James L Hayes is an artist whose practice spans sculpture, film and printmaking – but at heart he is something of an alchemist. Hayes is invested in the processes of metallurgy and the drama of transformation, exploring what it means to work with materials in states of flux. Nowhere is this more evident than in his ongoing engagement with ironcasting, an ancient, industrial and physically demanding process that he reclaims as both performance and material storytelling.
Hayes has been working with metal since the 1990s and, while bronze continues to dominate the realm of commemorative sculpture, his focus on iron is a deliberate counterpoint. Bronze, with its associations of permanence and prestige, is the preferred medium for war memorials and public monuments. Iron, by contrast, is humble, ubiquitous and embedded in the structures of everyday life, from bridges and mines to pots and pans. This tension – between the heroic and the utilitarian, the canonical and the common – is the conceptual fulcrum of Hayes’ work.
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