Seventy Five

Seventy Five marked Ray Haydon’s seventy-fifth year — he was born in 1950 — and brought twenty years of his sculpture together at Sanderson Contemporary in Auckland. At its centre was Advance, a larger bronze of the first work the gallery sold for him, in 2005. It stood alongside his newest pleather ribbons: old forms and new, with the same interest in line, movement and space running through them all.

By then Ray’s sculpture was held in private collections around the world. It had been shown at the country’s major sculpture events: NZ Sculpture OnShore, Shapeshifter in Wellington, NZ Sculpture on the Gulf and the Aotearoa Art Fair Sculpture Court. It had been written about in Art News, Art New Zealand, ArtZone, The New Zealand Herald, Urbis, Denizen and Sotheby’s magazine.

The work starts with negative space: the voids that solid forms shape, held in a frozen illusion of motion. Ray calls it “painting the air”. His flowing, spiralling lines change as you walk around them, and he pushes bronze, corten, stainless steel, wood and carbon fibre to their limits to get there. In his essay for the show, Dr Andrew Paul Wood placed this in a line running from Brâncuși’s Endless Column to Paul Klee’s “taking a line for a walk”.

Advance was patinated to the green of pounamu: part tree trunk or ponga frond, part ship’s prow. Drift and Fluidity looked back to the forms of his first decade, from 2006 until 2016. That was when the ribbon works arrived, in wood veneer on carbon fibre. The ribbons came back in their newest form, Flex and Spring, made in pleather and new colours including a deep forest green. The larger works, Current, Endurance and Travelling, carried on the serpentine line of his outdoor sculpture from the past ten years. Travelling IV, a new corten piece, rose from its base like a treble clef, and Concord spiralled through the air like a corkscrew.

Adapted from Dr Andrew Paul Wood’s essay for Sanderson, October 2025.