Current

Current was the most complex body of sculpture Ray Haydon had made to that point, united by movement and fluidity — and by the sea. A long association with it brings the vastness of space and the vagaries of wind and ocean currents into the work at a fundamental level.

The forms in Current hold paradoxes together: geometric and fluid at once, strong and light, contained and free, harmonious inside their asymmetry. They speak of an enduring relationship to nature and its cycles — above all the sea, which has run through Ray’s working life since boat building.

What looks like a simple idea usually isn’t. Bringing a work to this level of refinement takes extensive planning and technical rigour — Ray is continually mulling over concepts and improvements, and for this series he invented machinery to move the ideas along. When a detail needs refining, time becomes immaterial, as long as he can say at the end that the work is “as clean as it is possible to be.” When the finish is right, the production process becomes impossible to uncover: a complicated idea reduced to a simple, elegant form.

The works included the stainless steel Fluid series on basalt bases, hand-shaped mahogany wall works, and larger pieces such as United, Fortune and Soul. By then Ray had featured in publications in New Zealand and abroad, his work was in the James Wallace collection (now The Arts House Trust), and he had been invited to take part in NZ Sculpture OnShore, which opened that October.