Eudora Welty wrote about place as a thing that has influenced, nourished and instructed us. She further writes “man can…suffer if he’s exiled from it. [Place is] as close to our living as the earth we can pick up a rub between our fingers, something we can feel or smell”.

Through her work, Hays’ leverages images one might associate with marking transitions or temporal site --construction fences, festoons, caution tape. The work’s constant thread is an inquiry into how quotidian images can explore personal circumstance and transcend themselves, a kind of “aesthetic redemption”.