Peter Hayes: Wanderlust

About

The worldly influences within Peter Hayes’ work are vast. Born in Birmingham, he was selected to attend the Moseley School of Art at age 12. In 1961 he left to study at the Birmingham College of Art before travelling extensively in Africa. Over the course of several years, he worked as a ceramic artist with tribes and village potters who inspired him with the exquisite work they produced using very limited technology and tools. Moving on to India, Nepal, Japan, Korea and New Mexico, he found similar skills and adopted the techniques he learned.

Returning to the UK in 1982, Hayes built his studio in a disused tollhouse on Cleveland Bridge in Bath where he still works today. His work builds on the techniques and methods that he had learnt and is inspired by the memories of the landscapes that he’d seen, continuing their international links within major public and private collections throughout the world, including the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh; the Museum of Modern Art, Kingston Jamaica; the Gardner Collection, Toronto; the Museum of Modern Art, Brussels, Belgium; the Siber Collection, California, USA; and the JB Speed Museum, Louisville, KY.

Hayes’ unquenchable curiosity for the world is just as evident in his latest collection. After recently being drawn back to India to work on site on a large commission, Hayes discovered Udaipur in Rajasthan and with this other artists and craftsmen who have enabled him to work with a range of different materials, such as glass, marble, stone and Damascus steel. This new body of work presents Hayes’ new explorations with material and process, using these new skills to further explore the limits of his ceramic art, and demonstrates the impressive energy and intrigue of this artist who is definitely not standing still.