Superstructure

Superstructure saw Ray Haydon look at twentieth-century modernism — its architecture, painting and sculpture — through copper, cedar and American white oak. Simple horizontals and verticals, organised asymmetrically but held in balance: an investigation of space, light and form, and of positive and negative space.

What excites Ray as a sculptor is confronting a material in its raw state and overseeing its slow transformation into an arrangement of light, space and shadow. Here that meant copper, cedar and white oak worked into compositions of simple horizontals and verticals with an immaculate sense of proportion — asymmetrical, but inside an overall harmony. The works are made to be touched as well as looked at, and give up more than the first viewing offers.

The key piece, Untitled 2010, is built from identical rods of white American oak, each a multiple of a 32-millimetre unit. The measurements are exact and so are the spatial recesses they produce — but their placement through the 500-millimetre labyrinthine box looks random, because it is intuitive. Though the cube goes together rod by rod, in his mind’s eye Ray sees a solid block before him, removing geometrical sections until the form he’s after reveals itself.

The show took its name from Superstructure, a single-edition bronze from 2009, and its later versions in mahogany, cedar and white oak. The copper Melodic, Fusion, Flux and Swathe works carried the line onto the wall, horizontals and verticals cantilevering beyond corners and bases that aren’t there.