Velorum

Ray Haydon doesn’t sketch. He imagines the broad approach, maps the work in three dimensions — maquettes for the larger kinetic pieces — and builds. Forms are arranged, dismantled and remade; some are kept, others go back to the materials pile. Velorum showed where that playful, improvisational way of working had taken his sculpture.

The making is intuitive and spontaneous; the engineering is anything but. Ray devotes real time to working out what a piece needs to succeed — borrowing fabrication methods from boat building, jewellery design, model making and fine furniture construction, and in some cases inventing and building his own machinery to work a material the way he wants. A willingness to find an answer to any technical problem is what the whole practice runs on.

At this point he was fascinated by kinetic sculpture — works behaving like organic entities in space, constantly changing, so that the viewer has to watch the piece rather than simply look at it. Ray likens it to the difference between looking at a tree and watching the birds in it.

The scale had grown too: in five years the work moved from forty-centimetre bronzes to five-metre steel sculptures. The bulk didn’t grow with it. The pieces stay light and airy, enlivening space rather than overwhelming it — tracing lines, not stamping out monuments.

The title work, Velorum, is a three-metre kinetic sculpture in carbon fibre, made in an edition of three. It was shown with hand-shaped mahogany wall works such as Universal IX and Flicker, copper Flux pieces, and Revolution II in aluminium on a basalt base.