A lifetime of making
“I have spent my whole life making things. I never tire of the challenge of developing tools, techniques and knowledge of materials. Experimenting is both fun and frustrating at times; I’m pushing the boundaries of what I currently know to be possible to create beautiful things. The transformation of raw material to fluid form demands complete absorption into the journey.”
Born in Auckland in 1950, the son of an inventor who was also an expert in radio technology, he was building wooden toys at five, huts and trolleys at ten. The sea arrived early too — Scouts, then Sea Scouts, and a boyhood raft launched hopefully under the Ngāpipi Road Bridge that ended in a long wet walk home.
At fifteen he was apprenticed to Worrall’s, the Queen Street jewellers. “In the days before mass machine-produced products,” he says, “I excelled at detailed work.” It was the only formal training he would ever have. Everything since has been trial and error.
What followed was forty years of exacting trades. A jeweller in Australia and New Zealand in the early seventies; self-employed from 1974 as a jeweller, then silversmith and designer, his trophies gracing the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron. He made the twenty-five lions that stood guard on the fence pillars of Lion Breweries in Newmarket, worked to Thomas Heath’s original design — one of them sails with him to this day. From 2000 he hand-fabricated stainless steel fittings for superyachts — Janice of Wyoming, Kokomo, VvS1 — every fairlead unique, much of the interior work his as well.
And always, boats. He built his own thirty-foot kauri yacht, Te Kouma, over three years in a boat yard. He builds exact scale models from the drawings of real vessels, among them a 1:25 model of the A-class yacht Ariki — five hundred hours of kauri planking and some one hundred and fifty hand-made brass fittings. The launch he runs today, Aristos, the only one Des Townson ever designed, carries his woodwork and metalwork throughout, down to a stainless steel anchor of his own making.
Through all those years he modelled in plasticine — privately, for decades. In 2002 he made his first series of patterns intended as artworks, and let them sit. Then, in 2004, he met Sarah. She encouraged him to cast them, and to show them. Every gallery they approached wanted the work; they chose Artigiano — now Sanderson Contemporary. In October 2005 the gallery sold the first piece he sent them, a bronze called Advance.
That summer he made a ride-on bi-plane for Sarah’s toddler godson, and decided it deserved a laminated wood propeller. The propeller became a wall-hung sculpture — Sarah’s Christmas present — and with it came the idea for a first series of work. The timing could not have been better. In January 2006 the gallery called: an artist had been injured. Could he mount an exhibition in March? He had two months. Sculpture opened on 21 March 2006 and sold out in its first week. “I never looked back.” His second show that year was called Transition, named for the step he had just taken — a full-time artist, in his mid-fifties, after a lifetime of preparation he hadn’t known was preparation.
Twenty-one years with Sanderson have followed, with a new body of work almost every year: the early bronzes, the corten sentinels, the mirror-polished stainless steel, the carbon fibre ribbons that hold a thrown line frozen in the air, the kinetic works that dance to the wind. He still rarely draws, working straight into the material, inventing whatever tools and techniques each new idea demands, and installing most pieces himself — he knows exactly how each one is made, because he made it. More than 650 of his sculptures are held in private collections in New Zealand and overseas; his public works include Heliograph on Newmarket’s Teed Street and Air, commissioned for Saint Kentigern College.
Ideas percolate for months, and a “no” — that something can’t be made — is often the spark. “I usually have a thousand ideas bubbling away in my head,” he says. Each new series sets its own engineering problems, and he solves them in the workshop: a breathing system runs around the ceiling to feed his welding helmet, and louvres over the skylights stop the resin going off. “I frequently think ‘I’ve cracked it’ and then the next day find out that I haven’t — this tends to inspire me.”
The sea runs through all of it. “The flow and form of all my work is inspired by the sea and sails,” he says. The kinetic works are driven by the wind, never by motors, each built around a spine that sets its direction of movement, so that the piece seems to take on a life of its own. “I love to watch things outside rather than just look; the movement makes the difference.”
His own description of the ribbons is the simplest: “I always describe it as getting a ribbon, throwing it in the air, and freezing it.” They are made in reverse, the paint laid down first and the form shaped freely rather than in a mould. Walnut and oak veneers gave way to painted resins in black, white and a bold red — the red sparked by an old tin of shipbuilding paint — and lately to marine-grade pleather in new colours, among them a deep forest green.
Outdoors the line grows to monumental scale. Re-orient (2020), in polished marine-grade stainless steel, stands where a kauri died in the drought of 2019–20. Soul (2025), commissioned for a private Auckland garden, is his largest bronze: more than two and a half metres tall, over a hundred kilograms, and six months in the making.
Ray lives and works at Sandspit, north of Auckland, among native bush and mature kauri looking out to Kawau Island, where he and Sarah have built a sculpture garden around the house and workshop. Each summer Sanderson leads tours of the garden, and they have never drawn fewer than forty people. The workshop is his happy place; the summers are for cruising, with plasticine aboard. “I shall be a sculptor,” he says, “until my last day on this earth.”
