Maridee Hays is a California artist whose practice moves fluidly across disciplines, drawing together literature, movement, psychology, Eastern philosophy, journaling, and studio experimentation into a deeply personal visual language. Rather than approaching art through a single medium or tradition, Hays allows her experiences and studies to overlap naturally, creating work that feels intuitive and reflective. Her paintings and mixed-media pieces often explore states of awareness, transformation, and perception, revealing an artist interested less in fixed answers than in continual discovery. Influenced by spiritual inquiry and Eastern thought, Hays treats art as an open-ended process of observation and inner exploration. Each artwork becomes part meditation, part emotional record, and part physical trace of lived experience. Over time, her practice has expanded into increasingly layered forms, where texture, material, and symbolism work together to suggest movement between the internal and external worlds. Her recent rusted metal kimono works continue this direction, merging sculpture, painting, and symbolic form into artworks that carry both fragility and resilience.
In her two new rusted metal kimono pieces, Maridee Hays transforms the traditional garment into a visual field of memory, spirituality, and emotional energy. These works are not simply decorative representations of clothing. Instead, the kimono becomes a symbolic vessel — a body without a body, carrying traces of human presence, ritual, history, and transformation. Through rusted metal surfaces, flowing paint, embedded elements, and luminous color, Hays creates artworks that feel suspended between painting and sculpture, object and experience.
The first kimono piece is dominated by a dramatic vertical divide of black and electric blue running through the center of the form. The composition immediately suggests movement, as if energy is breaking open from within the garment itself. At the chest sits a circular element radiating outward like a spiritual emblem or inner sun. Blue lines extend across the surface like streams of water, veins, or pathways of thought. Around these vivid marks, the rusted textures create an earthy, weathered atmosphere that contrasts with the brightness of the painted sections.
This tension between decay and illumination becomes central to the work. Rust carries associations with time, erosion, aging, and exposure to the elements, while the sharp blues and glowing center suggest renewal and awakening. Hays allows both conditions to coexist. Rather than hiding deterioration, she embraces it as part of the artwork’s emotional language. The corroded surfaces become evidence of transformation rather than damage. The kimono itself feels alive, as though it has endured experiences, absorbed memories, and emerged altered but still radiant.
The use of the kimono form adds another layer of meaning. Traditionally associated with ceremony, identity, and cultural continuity, the kimono here becomes a spiritual silhouette rather than a functional garment. Without a visible figure inside, the viewer is invited to imagine presence through absence. The shape operates almost like a container for consciousness or emotional residue. Hays does not approach the form through strict cultural symbolism alone; instead, she uses it as an archetypal structure capable of holding universal human experience.
The second kimono piece expands this idea through a more luminous and celebratory visual language. Here, warm golds, reds, greens, and blues move across the surface in flowing vertical drips and layered textures. At the center is a sculptural flower-like form surrounded by horizontal illuminated lines, creating the impression of vibration or resonance moving through the garment. The LED lighting integrated into the work introduces an entirely different sensory experience. Light becomes material rather than simply illumination.
This addition of programmed light changes the emotional rhythm of the piece. The glowing lines cut through the rusted and painted surface with a quiet intensity, creating moments of reflection and contrast. The artwork shifts depending on the surrounding environment and the viewer’s movement around it. In this sense, the piece becomes active rather than static. Hays expands painting into a more immersive encounter where sculpture, technology, and spiritual symbolism intersect.
Despite the complexity of materials, there is an organic quality to both works. Paint drips resemble rain, roots, rivers, or emotional release. The surfaces feel intuitive rather than overly controlled. Hays allows spontaneity to remain visible, preserving the gestures and accidents that occur during the creative process. This openness gives the artworks a sense of honesty and immediacy.
The rusted metal kimono pieces also reflect Hays’ longstanding interest in consciousness and perception. Rather than presenting a fixed narrative, the works invite contemplation. They encourage viewers to slow down and absorb texture, color, shape, and symbolism gradually. The garments become meditative spaces where emotional and spiritual associations unfold over time.
These new works demonstrate Maridee Hays’ continued exploration of art as a living process. By combining rusted metal, paint, sculptural elements, and light within the symbolic structure of the kimono, she creates artworks that feel simultaneously ancient and contemporary. The pieces carry traces of ritual, healing, memory, and transformation while remaining deeply personal in their visual language. Through these forms, Hays reminds us that materials themselves can hold emotion, and that even weathered surfaces can become places of illumination.
