ART OF THE STATE
Scaling It Down
Hoss Haley, a sculptor known for giant steel pieces, is creating more intimate, personal work
By Liza Roberts
Hoss Haley’s steel sculptures stand like elegant typography on the landscape: giant sans-serif letters, semicolons, exclamation points. Linear, spherical, bold and approachable, many top 6 feet and are meticulously crafted of Corten steel, a weathering steel with a distinct rusted patina. The Spruce Pine artist ships it in from Alabama 10,000 pounds at a time, hauls it into his studio with a bridge crane, then mashes it in presses he made himself out of parts collected from a scrap yard.
That’s the art Haley’s widely known for, large public pieces that form focal points in prominent places like downtown Charlotte, the Charlotte Douglas International Airport, Spruce Pine’s Penland School of Craft and North Carolina State University. He’s in the permanent collections of museums including the Mint Museum, the Asheville Art Museum and the North Carolina Museum of Art, where his striking Union 060719 stands on a rise at the entrance, proudly welcoming all comers.
But Haley’s new work is quieter. More of an homage to nature than to power, he’s making white steel branches and trunks that lie tumbled or stand sawn, no longer alive but reaching, ghostly and elegant. They are a record of nature, he says, not an interpretation.
Making them is also a different process. Instead of pounding the repurposed roofing metal he uses for these works with massive machines, he rivets it together by hand, painstakingly, with thousands of individual rivets. He likens the process to quilting, to his grandmother’s own Depression-era quilts.
“I want to make sure I define the years I have left in the way that I want them,” says Haley, who is in his early 60s. That was true before Hurricane Helene hit his community so hard, before he and everyone around him found themselves without water or power for weeks on end. Before he found himself helping his neighbors, turning a welder into a generator to power his refrigerator, or clearing miles of local roads of fallen trees with his chainsaw.
After that, Haley looked at his tumbled white branches and saw something new. A premonition, perhaps, of what was to come.
Making the Tools
If his process has changed lately, what drives it hasn’t. Haley has always invented his own way of working and made his own tools to create his art. To fabricate his larger works, he had to figure out how to turn 5-foot-square sheets of weathering steel into a malleable artistic medium. He then had to take these rectilinear, 90-degree parallel planes and collide and combine them in unexpected and often sudden curves.
“It’s the tension that I find kind of juicy,” he says. That place — where man meets material, where straight and curved lines abut and diverge — has fascinated Haley since he was a boy. His family’s 3,000-acre wheat and cattle farm in Kansas offered wide-open vistas and a curving horizon, broken by a strict geometry of fencing and property lines. Also on the farm was a sizable metalworking shop, where Haley learned to weld and make things. Including machines; including art.
Today, after about 25 years in North Carolina, his work remains rooted in that past. “It’s an ongoing conversation between myself and the machines and the material and my worldview, and goes all the way back to the fact that I grew up on that farm in Western Kansas,” says Haley. “It’s all in there. It’s part of this big stew.”
The stew is constantly evolving. “I’m transitioning a little bit at my age,” he says. “I’m less interested in the public art scale.” One reason is the extensive time involved in making a massive work; another is the satisfaction he’s taking in creating on his own, without the four or five assistants needed to create his larger-scale pieces. As for a third, “I’m delving deeper into working alone, but also working towards work, instead of working towards deadlines,” he says. “I’ve always had a show or installation coming up. Now I’m trying to respond to what’s driving ideas in the studio, ideas that aren’t being forced by outside pressures. That’s a huge luxury, and one I’m enjoying. But it’s a little scary making work you don’t have a destination for.”
“Scary” doesn’t seem to daunt Haley. He’s doubling down on his fresh direction with the construction of a new studio on his property, a “clean space” for drawing and other less messy forms of art. Among the projects he’s planning there is the creation of a “drawing machine,” which he describes as “a way to take myself out of the equation, a way to bring a random component into the process, and then I’m in dialogue with that.” With a drawing utensil gripped by a mechanical arm, the machine he envisions would take its directions from nature. The weight of a bird on the various perches of a feeder, for instance, would move the pen or pencil up or down, left or right.
Separating himself from the physical act of making art, metaphorically and literally, is something Haley has explored for a long time. He believes the word “craft” is most useful as a verb, and he’s careful to keep it that way, “in service to the idea” rather than the point of it all. “So that if I decide to leave [the mark of] a weld, or take that [mark] away, that decision is based on where I’m trying to go with the work, not that I’m trying to show you some aspect of my ability to make crap,” he says.
It’s been a long time since Haley had to convince anyone of his ability to make art, “crap” or anything else. Some have compared Haley’s work with that of the celebrated, recently deceased Richard Serra, who also made massive, moving works of Corten steel. Haley credits Serra’s work with inspiring him to consider the power of mass and volume in his work. “Serra taught me that sculpture could go beyond the visual experience,” Haley says. “You could actually feel its presence.”
While that’s undoubtedly true in Haley’s large works, it is refined and distilled in his smaller ones. Perhaps that is due in part to the inspiration that’s fueling them. “I’ve found myself back in that place where I can forget to stop for lunch,” he says. “As an artist, there’s a reality: Oftentimes, art is just work. It might be inspired work, but a lot of days, you’ve got to get up, go to the studio, got to make it happen. So this has been fascinating to me, to be in that kind of a fresh place where all of the extraneous stuff has been taken away, and the process lends itself to a kind of meditative state.”