rachel hayes drapes colorful textiles over landscapes
With fabric as her brush and sunlight as her collaborator, Rachel Hayes transforms architectural spaces and natural landscapes into shifting compositions of color and movement with her large-scale, textile-based installations.
Hayes inserts vivid, translucent forms into places as varied as museum atriums, desert dunes, glass conservatories, and ancient ruins. Her latest projects span a long-term atrium installation at the Nevada Museum of Art titled Someday When We Are Dreaming, on view through 2026, a major commission for the Chicago Botanic Garden, a flag flying above Ballroom Marfa in Texas, and her participation in the group exhibition ‘Soft Structures’ through August 8th, 2025, curated by Jen Wroblewski. Hayes’ process begins on site. ‘I always chase the light, and I always trust my instincts first!’ she tells designboom, reflecting on the design process. ‘My first visual response to a site is usually the best, and I have learned to trust my intuition deeply. I like to think about how someone will move throughout a space and interact with my work. Standard methods of experiencing an artwork are less interesting to me. With my installations, there is no front or back, top or bottom in the traditional sense.’
White Sands 2014 | all images courtesy of Rachel Hayes
texture, durability, transparency, color and light form the pieces
Trained in fiber and painting, Hayes blends painterly sensibility with sculptural scale. Her site-specific work often responds to the physical context of its location, not only the surrounding architecture or landscape but also the light. ‘I take note of the sun’s position throughout a space to see where it peaks through, offering a chance to create reflections and color-casted shadows,’ she explains. ‘Once I have decided how I want the piece to look, I bring in a practical side of my brain to engineer the construction and solve any installation issues. Depending on the demands of the site and lifespan of the work, I choose the appropriate materials.’
The Tulsa-based artist considers texture, durability, transparency, and the emotional resonance of color. ‘I am always thinking about texture, lightness, contrast, and color. I know how to pick materials that will work with light, and that’s important to a lot of my indoor installations. Outdoor installations are more complicated, because longevity and weather are players, but this also makes it an exciting experience. I hope these exhilarating experiences come across in my photos,’ she shares with us.
Tulsa Urban Core Art Project
Ephemeral Landscapes and Chromatic Rhythms
The artist uses photography to document the ephemeral nature of her work. Rachel Hayes often installs her fabric pieces temporarily in outdoor settings before removing them, including the gypsum dunes of White Sands National Park in New Mexico, ancient ruins in Turkey, and the Flint Hills of Kansas. These moments are fleeting, but the imagery lingers, capturing what she describes as ‘subtle and ephemeral nuances such as the changing light, shifting shadows, or the sound of fabric rustling in the breeze.’
Color is central to Hayes’ language, intuitive but never arbitrary. ‘Let’s call it controlled intuition. I will decide on a palette (the control), and within that group of colors, I’ll play (intuitively) with translucence, opacity, and tonal variation. I love a good staccato and rhythm within a piece to keep an eye roving about. I guess you could say that I think of color in musical terms.’ Her chromatic decisions often reflect the site or institution hosting the work. ‘I do take a site or venue into consideration. I have an installation opening August 23rd at the Georgia Museum of Art. My color references were in response to a few pieces in the museum’s collection: a Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass window, and paintings by Sam Gilliam, Joan Mitchell, Elaine DeKooning, Manierre Dawson, and Albert Eugene Gallatin. These beautiful constraints present me with endless color compositions,’ she says.
Columbus, Georgia
Art That Lives in Open-Air and Transitional Spaces
Rachel Hayes has long sought to bring her installations into unexpected places, beyond the white cube, toward more porous environments. Her work has been shown at SculptureCenter in New York, the deCordova Museum in Massachusetts, the Everson Museum in Syracuse, and the Roswell Museum in New Mexico, as well as in galleries from Los Angeles to Istanbul. She has collaborated with Italian fashion house Missoni on a solo exhibition during Milan Design Week, and more recently exhibited with ISTANBUL’74 during Contemporary Istanbul and at NOMAD in Capri. In 2023, she was invited to present a textile installation at the ancient Agora of Smyrna during the Turkish Textile Biennial.
Her dream sites aren’t only galleries but transitional or open-air spaces. ‘I would love to work in more large glass atriums, small alleyways, under piers by an ocean, and always more prairie grasslands.,’ she states. These are places where her textiles can respond to wind, weather, and light, where the work is never static, always changing with the day. Ultimately, Hayes sees her work as a way of engaging the senses—and the body. ‘I’m interested in how the power of scale and the ordered construction of bright color can attract a viewer’s physical response,’ she reflects. But beyond that initial pull, her pieces ask for deeper feeling. ‘I hope they will also experience more subtle and ephemeral nuances, such as the changing light, shifting shadows, or the sound of fabric rustling in the breeze,’ Rachel Hayes comments.
in Edge of Becoming, two panels span 100 feet on the grounds of Fruitlands Museum
Garden Loom, New Mexico
Little Barn Outside
Mirror Lake
Arcosanti, Arizona
a site-specific installation of nine sewn panels installed at the Agora of Izmir in Smyrna
Black Cube | image by Third Dune
Black Cube | image by Third Dune
Cloud Report, South Dakota
Whitesands National Park, New Mexico
Whitesands National Park, New Mexico
Backyard Path, Chris and Ben’s house
Fairfield, Iowa
project info:
artist: Rachel Hayes | @rachelbhayes
current exhibitions:
name: Soft Structures
location: Jane Lombard Gallery, New York
curator: Jen Wroblewski
dates: June 27th – August 8th, 2025
name: Patterned by Nature
location: Chicago Botanic Garden
dates: June 7th – September 21st, 2025
name: Someday When We Are Dreaming
location: Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV
dates: on view through 2026
name: Looking Through a Sewn Sky
location: Georgia Museum of Art
dates: August 23rd, 2025 — July 30th, 2027
The post ‘i always chase the light’: rachel hayes activates space with monumental textile installations appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.