New Work

New Work was about process: nearly fifty years of making, as jeweller, industrial designer, maker of bespoke superyacht parts and artist, distilled into Ray Haydon’s sculpture with the labour kept invisible. Steel bent until its original form is a distant memory; carbon fibre moulded soft and left to set hard.

The seamless elegance of these works comes from laborious work and constant experimentation. Ray works directly into his chosen medium — sometimes mapping an idea with a maquette first — letting a fascination with movement and fluidity play out at monumental and intimate scale. All of that working history feeds the sculpture: a workshop full of hand-made tools, and techniques built up over decades.

Untitled (2015) shows what that buys — stainless steel bent and moulded into a fluid form with every sign of making hidden, so the new shape reads as the steel’s natural state. The carbon fibre Volume works run the process in reverse: a soft, fabric-like material moulded into shape, then left to set until it’s as robust as the supercars and aeroplanes it’s usually found in.

Sometimes the process changes whether he likes it or not. When Ray lost his usual supply of timber for the wall-mounted works, the formula he’d developed for bending mahogany went with it — and rather than patch one step, he rethought the entire process. The challenge produced a series of subtle improvements and some of the most robust works he had made, Origin (2015) among them. None of it is visible in the finished piece, which is the point: the making stays secondary to the form.

Lana Lopesi, who wrote the essay for the show, set this against Ananda Coomaraswamy’s line that “beauty is the attractive power of perfection”, and against the whakataukī “Kaore te kumara e korero mo tona māngaro”: the kūmara does not speak of its own sweetness. Ray doesn’t speak of his either. The mastery is clear as soon as you share a space with the work, and each piece speaks for itself.

Adapted from Lana Lopesi’s essay for Sanderson, 2015.