Hugh Hayden Wrestles With Childhood

Pinocchio was a block of wood who dreamed it was a boy. The sculptor Hugh Hayden is a man who dreams he’s a tree, and so is everything else – a wooden world. Hayden titled his first solo show in Dallas, at the Nasher Sculpture Center, ‘Homecoming’, because he grew up in the city. The 14 pieces on view explore variations on the motifs for which the artist is known: furniture growing branches, shiny cookware with faces like Edgefield jugs and basketball hoops with rattan baskets for nets. The idea of return also finds expression in the sweep of the exhibition, across thematic rooms representing church, school, home and nature – a local kid made good, describing the legs of a Dallas coming-of-age. At one end, ‘church’ takes the form of a steepled building made of unfinished cedar, scaled like a playhouse, titled Happily Ever After (all works 2024). At the other, a whitewashed Adirondack chair with a side table, both sprouting brown branches, faces one of the Nasher’s picture windows and outdoor sculpture garden. It’s titled Heaven. That’s a homecoming, too.

The middle section, the first that viewers encounter upon entering the space, contains Brush, a red oak playground structure with a slide and rope bridge, slightly shrunken and made from lumber bristling with boar’s hair like a broom head. There’s a sample plank behind the museum’s front desk, and you can feel the softness of the bristles – in counterpoint to the school cafeteria table in the next section over, which is displayed between wall-mounted mirrors in an infinite regress. This work, Cutting Board, bristles, too, but with the thorny business ends of red coloured pencils, whittled into nubs, curling and arthritic. Next is a school gym, denoted by a row of prefab grey lockers. One locker stands open to reveal a football helmet, pads and cleats covered entirely in chips of cherry bark. In this weird wood, bark is a tree’s armour – you wonder how this gear would fare on the gridiron. Titled Blending In, the football getup seems more like the camouflage of an arty kid in a sports-crazed milieu. There’s no ‘art’ section to this survey of Hayden’s upbringing – or, rather, the whole show is that section.

The strangest and busiest room is a domestic setting: seven sculptures, dominated by a round breakfast table and four chairs titled Supper. Like the cafeteria table and benches, this furniture is thick with jutting thorns – only these are capped with rubber erasers. A polished copper sculpture comprising a tuba bell combined with a frying pan (Untitled) emits the sound of sizzling fat. Nearby, on a white Ikea sofa, lounges Laure, a headless skeleton carved from dark mesquite, its limbs made of a plunger, feather duster, broom and mop, evoking the remains of a being made to do chores. (The sculpture is titled after the Black maid in Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), standing in the pale odalisque’s shadow.) Two more wooden skeletons hang from a closet rod nearby, clothes hangers protruding from their necks and their ribcages almost interlocking. The skeleton sculptures are macabre and funny, something between anatomical models dangling in a cliché science classroom and a cedar clothes freshener, with an obvious pun on skeletons in the closet. They’re a clear insinuation of a common finality – dust to dust, whatever colour your skin was – yet their sanded, stained surfaces miss the nicks and warps of used bones.

Then there’s Pecanocchio, a pecan wood dummy standing in a crib made of the same material, dressed in red lederhosen with a broom handle’s worth of lying nose. ‘Homecoming’ is Pecanocchio’s world. The sculpture is the only more or less fleshed-out human figure in the show. The elongated snout suggests the crib is more like a jail for dishonest wooden boys. But here is a ‘child’, and this is a child-scaled scene ­– a fairytale of toddlerhood to adolescence, capped by a homecoming.

The exhibition alludes to the artist’s biography – Hayden’s sculptures have the psychological tang of grotesque memories – yet the objects and situations he creates feel general and approachable. Surely many people had religious upbringings, played high school sports and ate around a table – especially in Texas. This is the real weirdness of Hayden’s work: not its fantastic arboreal flourishes, but its underlying banality. It’s routine but twisted in legible ways. The hallucination of a hundred spindly growths on your patio set loses its strangeness when the same thing happens in your kitchen and your cafeteria. Keep carving and you’ll have a normal table – it’s there, in the wood. And maybe tables are stranger than trees.

The domestic section contains another outlier: a collage of the tricolour Texas state flag rendered in pink, white and blue pressed pills, stuck to a sheet of ruled notebook paper. They’re named in the materials, or you can Google them: Descovy, an HIV-prevention drug; Zyrtec, for allergies; and Propecia, prescribed off-label for hair loss. This particular regimen, within all the show’s abstraction, takes on the aspect of portraiture. For all that, though, these could be anyone’s pills. Again, the counteracting material sameness, the disconcerting continuity of the materials, one pill just like the next, a whole table made of fir and steel, a skeleton with an unnerving fullness to its marrowless bones. The sprays of branches are wild, but clean – the plunger on the skeleton’s arm has scatological airs but is relentlessly unused – as, indeed, nothing here has been or could be put to its usual purpose. All the pieces of life have been laid out, yet there’s no living happening. As the branches on the furniture extend from the boards along the path of growth, but no longer grow, the exhibition’s stations of life have a zombified vibe, transformed but incompletely so, dead in the rough posture of life.

Trees are endless fonts of symbolism, almost to the point of astrology. As a sculptor, Hayden attends to the different ways that particular types of wood are used. Common slatted furniture is sometimes made from fir, while the skeletons stuffed inside the football pads are cedar, the choice for shoe trees and linen closets. The diminutive church, even, is made of unpainted cedar: the wood of a tree that figures in the Bible as a symbol of strength and longevity. Trees are reliable, or sacred, or duplicitous. The pecan tree, stuff of Pecanocchio, evokes prosperity, and is the state tree of Texas, a major exporter of pecans.

Hayden invites you to play with this symbolism, if you wish. The Texas tree makes the dark-complexioned Pecanocchio figure, who could be an avatar of the Texas-born and -raised artist. That could also be too far, too literal. ‘Homecoming’ is about childhood, after all – a phenomenon that, if you’re reading this, you’ve experienced. But the idea of childhood retains an innate incompleteness, or promise. ‘Homecoming’ names touchstones of Hayden’s youth that many people his age might recognize, while also stepping back from conclusions or judgments. Childhood is unfinished, the way living wood is unfinished. On the one hand, there’s a plan; on the other, so many unforeseen and chaotic forces temper and shape an individual person, or plant. Growth is a slow shock.

‘Hugh Hayden: Homecoming’ is on view at Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas until 5 January

^{Main image: Hugh Hayden, Pecanocchio, 2024, pecan, cotton, plastic, and steel hardware, 102 × 91 × 61 cm. Courtesy: © Hugh Hayden and Lisson Gallery; photograph: Kevin Todora}