Untitled Sculpture

The example of Hayashi's work shown here is of a type with which he began experimenting in the early 1980s. It was hand-built with the aid of a mould from slightly open-textured stoneware clay before being totally covered in black slip. A series of operations involving the masking out of areas of the slip covering and the spraying on of glaze by air-gun was then used to build up the illusionistic surface patterning. While this particular piece consists of an upright half-cylinder sitting on a flat elliptical base, most of Hayashi's recent sculptures are more severely angular in form. In all cases, however, they are remarkable for the way in which real and suggested depth are used to produce complex, often multi-layered, three-dimensional structures.