?My sculptures were always environmental events that demanded a physical commitment of the person experiencing it with all their senses. Even in my most current work forty years later I?m still making sculptures that are inside out, sculptures that require you attend to their interior rather than a lump that you go up to and walk around.? -Michael Hayden, November 24, 2004
Michael Hayden?s life long preoccupation with light was evident in the early 1960s in his student work at the Ontario College of Art where, much to his teacher?s surprise, he used Day-Glo paint in his watercolour class. His paintings soon became more textured and sculptural, ?leaning off the walls? with roofs, motors and interior lights, setting the stage for a long and fruitful career where technology was an integral part of his art.
In making his work, Hayden seeks whatever technologies and expertise he requires to manifest particular ideas. In the case of Head Machine, 1967, for example, Hayden created ?Intersystems? and summoned the talents of architect Dick Zander, the poet Blake Parker, and the electronic music composer John Mills-Cockell, to create an anodized aluminum structure with port-holes that opened onto painted kinetic structures, and a world of light and sound that elicits the psychedelic fantasies of the 1960s.
In the last forty years, Hayden?s ?lumeric sculptures? are testimony to his continuing fascination with light and colour and the interaction between technology and humanity. He has exhibited widely around the world and received hundreds of commissions for architecturally scaled public works and environments. He has collaborated with architects, interior designers, engineers, landscape architects, composers, poets and visual artists. His work can be found in public collections in Canada, the United States, England, Scotland, Korea and the Netherlands. In 1984, he and his wife, the sculptor Kristina Lucas, founded Thinking Lightly Inc., from which Hayden attracts commissions for lumeric sculptures that continue to surprise and delight the public.