SLO Town has two new public art installations to marvel over.
Along the Way consists of colorful fabric panels hung over the Garden Street Alley between Garden and Broad streets. Lyrics and Crescendos features sewn-together acetate lighting gels installed in the Performing Arts Center on the Cal Poly campus.
Both are created by Tulsa-based fabric artist Rachel B. Hayes, whose work has been covered by The New Yorker, The New York Times, Architectural Digest, Vogue, Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Bazaar, and Artforum among others.
While attending the Kansas City Art Institute, Hayes was trying to decide which department to go into and was leaning toward sculpture, but that changed.
“I discovered the fiber department, which I’d never thought of as an option. I didn’t set out to go to art school and think about fabric. Within the department, you study textiles, basketry, weaving and dyeing silk or any kind of fiber or fibrous material, like paper making,” she said.
Inspired by the work of large-scale iron sculptor Richard Serra, Hayes wanted to do something big but not require a crew.
“If you’re working really large, you usually need a bunch of other people to help you because the materials are so heavy and cumbersome, but fabric is the opposite,” Hayes explained. “With fabric and textiles, I could make something huge, like the size of a wall.”
She also likes that fabric can be appreciated on various scales.
“You can get up close and see the stitches and the different nuances of the material, and I can play with color in the way a painter would, and I can have scale that gives me the feeling that I’m building my own architecture, so it’s a way for me to do everything I want to do,” she said.
Hayes has taken something considered small and fastidious—sewing—often dismissed as “women’s work,” and blown it up into something monumental, work on scale with the architecture around it, transforming huge spaces.
“I like the act of piecing colors together. It’s like a puzzle,” she explained. “Each piece starts in the middle, and then I build it out from that, over and over until it gets as big as it needs to be, and within there, I get to make all these color choices and think about light and dark and different tones and how they’re all going to react together and how to create balance within the piece.”
The finished works interact with the changing light patterns of the spaces they’re installed in, so she must think about the 24-hour cycle of light within a space.
“I love thinking about that. The piece in the Performing Arts Center, the sun will come up and hit those windows around 9 or 10 a.m., and it will completely change the piece. It will change all day long, projecting color.”
Hayes buys 4-foot-by-20-foot rolls of material used in acetate lighting gels and cuts pieces to size, sewing them together with a silky theater scrim she sources from a theater supply company.
“The piece downtown, it will go to sleep at night, and maybe there’s not a lot of interaction in the dark, but then it wakes back up. The piece in the alley, when the sun is shining directly over it, it really makes the scene stand out. Where each color meets, the fabric is folded over a few times to make a very strong seam, and that makes a line very similar to stained glass—the dark line between the colors. I love that.”
Quilt work also comes to mind, as well as the cloth-covered bazaars of places like Istanbul and Madrid.
“We were in Istanbul a couple years ago,” Hayes said. “I’ve done a lot of overhead installations, so when we were walking through these markets and bazaars, I was surprised at how informally rigged these canopies were, but I loved looking at it. It was like an art installation, and it was very inspiring.”
For the PAC installation, Lyrics and Crescendos, she said she didn’t like the title until the installation was finished.
“The piece looks like sheet music with all the horizontal lines and just the movement of the piece. It reminded me of a big, sweeping gesture of sound,” Hayes said.
She likes its grand scale and the fact that as you get closer to it, you can clearly see it’s handmade.
“It adds to the visual interest,” she said, “and it also can create a more guttural response, the idea of taking care and making something, like an offering, a grand gesture of creating something huge and thinking about the space.” Δ
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Mar 6-16, 2025.
We have so many amazing local artists, this installation is literally right behind a local store called Making SLO, a a shop that sells local, handmade art. Why was this contracted to an artist from somewhere else??