Paula Hayes is an artist that combines sculpture and gardening and creates amazing miniature worlds in her terrarium installations. Terrariums are miniature landscapes inside transparent containers. They house small plants that do not adapt well to normal home atmospheres. When properly planted and located, they provide a novel way to grow many plants with minimal care.
Paula Hayes is first and foremost an artist and her terrariums are poetic and imaginative. She uses organically shaped vessels made of silicon, acrylic or hand-blown glass. Inside the vessels she creates miniature worlds with living plants, crystals, rocks and other natural components.
The shape and sizes of the terrariums vary, some are like small globes some are like elongated bubbles and some stand vertically. They can be placed on pedestals or on the floor, free standing or hanging.
Hayes has been making these botanical sculptures Since the 1990s, using her experience as a landscape designer to expand upon the classic terrarium and create microcosmic universes. In the words of Hayes herself about her terrariums: “It’s only very partially an object. It’s mostly a verb.”
Recently her terrariums were exhibited in the lobby of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The installation named “Nocturne of the Limax Maximus” consisted of two large scale terrariums: a fifteen foot long, wall mounted piece named “slug” and a free standing floor to ceiling structure named “egg”. These beautifully lit living sculptures emphasized Paula Hayes’ fusion of living organism and art.
For me, looking at any of these delicate, thoughtful terrariums is like looking into a fantasy wonderland, the only problem is choosing which one I prefer.
Her terrariums and crystal gardens range from $4,000 to $60,000.
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