Evolve

Evolve introduced a new kind of work from Ray Haydon: Drift, shaped by hand from American white oak, undulating across the wall like leaves moving over a forest floor. Around it hung new ribbon sculptures in walnut and oak and Voyage IV, a large relief continuing the Voyage series, with three standing sculptures made to weather outdoors into deep crimsons and browns.

By 2024 Ray had been making sculpture for more than twenty years. The work responds intuitively to space and is made with refinement and precision, yet the line stays free, carrying a sense of movement and velocity. Sian Abel, writing for Voyage two years earlier, named its foundation as fluidity: “matter slipping through time, often illusory and unseen, but made visible in sculpture.” In the spirit of Constructivists like Naum Gabo, Ray keeps testing the forms a sculpture can take, playing with pure materiality and shape to stretch the spatial dynamics as far as they will go.

Drift was the departure: white oak worked by hand until it moves across the wall the way leaves drift in wind, or waves fold slowly over one another. Evolution XII, in walnut veneer on carbon fibre, led the new ribbon works, and Voyage IV sat proud of the wall, looping in autumnal hues. The three standing sculptures each rest in a stone base: Current VIII, a bronze with delicate fluid lines; Endurance III, a tubular cast steel form; and Travel VII, a corten piece winding into an intricate infinite loop. All three were made for the outdoors, to weather slowly to deep shades of crimson and brown.

What Ray keeps returning to is the simple flowing line and the space a work creates. He likes the idea of a person walking around a sculpture, the work morphing and changing their perspective as it’s viewed. Dr Andrew Paul Wood, interviewing him for ArtZone in 2023, connected that line to Paul Klee’s “taking a line for a walk”, and to the negative space the sculptures mark out.