Bill Hayes

Bill Hayes grew up in New York along the Hudson River, and by age 17 had travelled around the US, Europe and North Africa. These travel experiences were to have a great effect on his views of art, life and education.

During his  senior year at Alfred University he was awarded the Senior Show award in Ceramic sculpture and began work on the series that continues to fascinate him to the present day.

Upon graduating, he began work at the fine art foundry Tallix in Beacon, New York ,where he worked with artists such as Julian Schnable, Frank Stella, Roy Liechtenstein, Jeff Koons, Mark Kastabi and others. After a couple of New York winters, he returned to California and spent the next 5 years working at Artworks Foundry in Berkeley California.

“It was a period of real artistic discourse working all day for various artists, all evening doing my own work and all night in the discussion of the merits of both, with other emerging artists. During this time I continued my exploration of organic sculptural form.”

In 1997 Bill moved to New Zealand and maintains a studio at the Lake House art centre in Takapuna where he continues to create sculpture in a variety of materials.

For the past 20 years Bill has been making a name for himself as a leading New Zealand sculptor– both for commissions in bronze and as a ceramics teacher.

“I have been enthralled in the action of creation for many years now, and my series of works titled Wall Reliefs, represents an exciting new direction.  I see them as a narrative about the process of creating sculpture.  They have an industrial quality that is so much a part of working with cast metals  – and they show a physicality that is required to produce a finished work.  They challenge the viewer to look, contemplate and bring to bear their own aesthetic sense of form to the work.”

Bill Hayes has been exhibiting in ARTIS Gallery with MANZ (Medal Artists New Zealand) since 2017.