The Score is a multifaceted contemporary art project by Cork-based artist James L Hayes, developed in collaboration with and curated by composer Peter Power, combining cast iron sculpture, film, and sound. The work explores the materiality, heritage, and cultural spectacle of the ancient Irish sport of road bowling.

GOMA Gallery of Modern Art in Waterford City is thrilled to announce the launch of The Score & Other Works by James L Hayes.

The Score is a multifaceted contemporary art project by Cork-based artist James L Hayes, developed in collaboration with and curated by Peter Power, combining cast iron sculpture, film, and sound. The work explores the materiality, heritage, and cultural spectacle of the ancient Irish sport of road bowling.

The first iteration of The Score was Commissioned by Cork County Council in 2021 and supported by Creative Ireland. Taking three years to complete, The Score explores the heritage, culture and sporting tradition of Irish road bowling that has been played in County Cork and across Ireland since the seventeenth century.

The work highlights a non-narrative artistic observation of the game, its athleticism, theatre and spectacle, as well as acknowledging its long-standing heritage and tradition. The exhibition features Hayes’s cast iron road bowls alongside film and sound works that present a distinctive creative response to the sport, developed in collaboration with members and players from Ból Chumann na hÉireann.

The work offers a contemporary lens through which to experience the rich tradition of a sport still practiced today across rural Ireland—including in County Waterford. Central to the exhibition are hand-cast iron road bowls, made by Hayes using a bespoke furnace, and used in real matches—known as “Scores”—by competitive players.

Collaborating with EPIC Productions and director Chris Cullen, Hayes created a series of films that document and respond to the physical and performative nature of the sport. These are accompanied by a specially commissioned soundtrack by renowned composer Peter Power, bringing a sensorial and immersive dimension to the installation.

Visitors to GOMA Waterford will be invited to handle the sculptural bowls, forging a tactile connection with the sport’s raw physicality and its origins in repurposed 17th-century cannonballs. By rooting this iteration in Waterford, where road bowling is still active—particularly around Fenor and West Waterford—Hayes also aims to collaborate with local bowlers through a wider engagement programme.

Through material, sound, and social practice, The Score invites audiences to consider tradition, place, and the evolving nature of cultural identity through contemporary art.

James L Hayes is a contemporary artist based in Cork he has multi-disciplinary art practice, making sculptures, installations, cast iron performance works and films, as well as developing large scale sculptural commissions and public art projects. His sculptural work aims to draw out the often-incongruous relationships between finished art objects, and the industrial aspects of the processes that produce these revered objects. This referencing or reimagining is brought together with his broader research interests that range from contemporary interpretations of sculptural legacies, to site-specific interventionist works that draw from traces of significant pasts and histories.

Hayes exhibits his works nationally and internationally, recently exhibiting at The Glucksman Gallery, Cork ,The Regis Center for Arts, The University of Minnesota, The MART Gallery , Dublin, The McNally School of Fine Arts at La Salle College of Arts in Singapore, The UNO Gallery in New Orleans, Art Market Budapest and The SUPERMARKET Art Fair Stockholm.

Recent commissions have been created for The Office of Public Works(OPW), The Arts Council of Northern Ireland. In 2015 he was artist in residence at the The Irish Museum of Modern Art and was awarded Cork County Councils Tyrone Guthrie Residency Award in 2019 he has received numerous awards from the Arts Council of Ireland, Culture Ireland, Cork City Council and Cork County Council to support his practice.

He is a graduate of The Limerick School of Art & Design (TUS), De Montfort University, Leicester and University College London in the UK and he is the principal Lecturer in Sculpture at MTU Crawford College of Art in Cork Ireland.