DESIGNER SPOTLIGHT by JENNIFER LAPKA | Collection photos by RACHEL HAYES
Building with Color. The glistening sand dunes covering 275 square miles of New Mexico are a place of great beauty and irony. Simultaneously, a revered, protected national monument and a utilitarian, marred, missile-testing site. No wonder the White Sands’ undulating, rare gypsum dunes have captured many a creative mind. In 2015, American artist and Kansas City Art Institute graduate Rachel Hayes packed her car with her most recent body of work and family and drove to White Sands National Monument. The neutral waves of sand, brightblue sky, and purple mountain tops in the distance proved a perfect landscape for Rachel’s artwork, which is a marriage between her love for multiple artistic disciplines,
including sewing, painting, basketry, and welding, and her love for color. “I build with color,” explains Rachel, “it can get an emotional and guttural response, especially with scale. Color and scale have been used as metaphors of power in art.” The artwork, comprised of machinesewn blocks of vinyl, fur, nylon, silk, and polyester ranging in size from 5 feet by 8 feet to 60 feet by 90 feet, was documented laid flat on the sand and hovering in the air. Living and enjoying a nomadic life that has taken her to the states of Virginia, New York, Iowa, New Mexico, and more, Rachel joined Instagram in 2014 to keep up with friends past, document her work, and “capture ephemeral moments.” Rachel received a DM (direct message) in July
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