Halsey Rodman

Halsey Rodman's practice asks us to consider time in relation to everything from plants to planets, collapsing vast temporal scales into intimate, direct observation and simultaneous perspective. Rodman’s work proposes a consensual and liberating encounter with objects by rendering apparent the radical instability of their forms.

Though appearing disparate and sometimes improvised, his work is conceived and executed using specific structural, performative, and/or temporal frameworks. Rodman often integrates gestural painting, diagrammatic drawing, and intense color with sculptural and architectural constructions. He has collaborated with others to realize “event-based group figurative sculptures.” Rodman draws inspiration from wide-ranging sources, from the Pink Panther to Lacan to Virginia Woolf and Samuel Delaney.

In Conversation with Friday Arts

Friday Arts

How do you think about place in relation to your work?

Halsey Rodman

My work seeks to elevate the specificity of conditions, that this particular configuration of light, leaf, stem, branch, paper, and graphite will never happen again; it just can’t, tomorrow night everything will be different: the plant will grow, the paper will move, the night breeze and cicadas will make a new chorus and my hand will waver in a different way. I try to form nodes where the specificity of conditions, of place, of process can produce form, can leave a trace, an impression, an afterimage.

I’ve always wanted to see before and after the present tense, the before and after of a place, and at the same time I know there’s nothing but this perpetual present process; my work reflects this contradiction.

What's the interplay for you with the natural world?

My approach to the natural world is that either all or none of it is natural: the redwoods, the mountains, the oceans, lakes, streams, the plastic, the silicone, the PTFE, the cobalt, the zinc, paper pulp and printers ink and the windows in envelopes, meteorites, sublimation, love, underwater data cable, wind turbines, anxiety, and the back-up sirens from the bus depot across the street from my house; everything is a process.

Tell us about the work you've exhibited with Friday Arts in the Vernal exhibition.

The Wind at Night (B) is part of a group of three pieces all called The Wind at Night. This title comes from thinking about the constant wind across the desert land near Joshua Tree. I’ve spent a lot of time out there over the last decade of so because of my long-term project, Gradually / We Became Aware / Of a Hum in the Room, which is located in an area called Gamma Gulch. The landscape there is relatively arid, with low, scrubby vegetation amongst the rocks and sand. The wind blows continuously; the geology is completely still but the plants vibrate, a constant hum of oscillation blanketing the surface of the land, a constant shiver of very slight difference.

I like to think of the wind at night blowing across the rocks and plants, and the way the plants are there, vibrating in the breeze, all the time, whether someone’s there to see them or not. There’s a continuity to this presence, a weight to it, that gets outside of human time and at the same time it’s so corporeal, the pulse of the breeze, the movement of leaves in that constant wind, what you feel on your skin when you’re there, a kind of breath.

The Wind at Night (B) is an outlier in the sense that it’s the only piece I’ve ever made with bricks. It was suggested by a specific situation that I observed on daily walk with my dog over many years. There was an older house on the other side of my block, a big wood-slatted house, a bit dilapidated but with beautiful stained glass accents. The windows were big double hung windows, thick wood frames with those old panes of glass where you can see the liquid state of glass, a bit rippled with time. Their front window was right at eye level so it felt close when you walked by; when the weather got warm they’d open up the bottom frame and there would be a red clay brick hanging there from some twine, right in the middle of the window, behind a screen but very clearly visible. It was mysterious, why hang a brick in your window, especially the window of a wood house?

After walking by for quite a few years, just loving this situation, the brick hanging there in the window night and day, I realized it was entirely practical: they were using the brick as a counterweight for the double hung window, it was there it help the pick up this gigantic frame and pane of glass. The wood circle with the title phrase cut out in window letters is sort of a moon, another sequential object that changes each night.

Mastic Tree from Five Angles has a formal relationship to The Wind at Night (B) (namely, the circle and the collection of shapes hanging in space) but it also comes out of another flow of work, one I began around 1997 in my Los Angeles studio on Mission Road.

To make a long story short, I’ve been messing around with flashlights and plants in the dark for a long time, tracing the shadows of plants on walls and sculptures, sometimes just casting the shadows for the thrill of it, giant monster plants cast from miniature palms, a whole forest from a single schefflera. I love the way that a shadow is a shape that has a perspective: the specific form of the shadow you cast contains information about the subject (in this case, a mastic tree), the position of the light source, and the position of the surface where the shadow is cast. All these are packed into the shape of the shadow; the shadow is a recording of the light looking at the plant, seeing from a perspective—as from our bodies—somehow decoupled from the seeing so that you can walk around it.

I made this drawing in August of 2023 in Cassis, a beach town not too far from Marseille. Pam (Lins) and I were at a residency there for four weeks and our patio had this beautiful mastic tree on one side, I ate breakfast under it every day. I was spending a lot of time listening to the sound of the cicadas at dusk and I was looking for a way to make a drawing from this listening, this openness to the environment, this flowing in from the outside.

It’s not a linear process but this drawing emerged from that desire, to make a space to listen to the form of the mastic tree, to make a space to hold impressions of its form, so I drew the seven shapes and cast shadows from five angles to fill them. Later, I painted the space around the shapes night sky blue, so they would hang there in space, a constellation of shapes somewhere between positive and negative, held in configuration but just barely.

About the Artist

Halsey Rodman (b. 1973, Sacramento, CA) received his BA in sculpture from The College of Creative Studies at UCSB and his MFA from Columbia University. Rodman has held teaching appointments at Yale University, Rutgers, and Cooper Union, among others, and is currently the Chair of Sculpture at the Bard MFA program. He has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally at venues including Kansas Gallery (NYC), Soloway (Brooklyn), Guild & Greyshkul (NYC), The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, and the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA).

He is a principle organizer (and sometimes president) of Ceramics Club, a hybrid arts cooperative and fundraising organization hosted by Greenwich House Pottery. In November 2025 Ceramics Club opened their third fundraiser at White Columns (NYC) comprised of unique ceramic works from more than 115 artists. His project Gradually / We Became Aware / Of a Hum in the Room is on long-term view at High Desert Test Sites (Joshua Tree, CA).