Voyage

Voyage brought Ray Haydon’s newly developed colourful forms together with his ribbon-like reliefs in bronze, carbon fibre and wood. The Covid years had been productive ones in the workshop, with material shortages becoming a reason to experiment, and the show turned on time: the moments between movement and stillness.

Sian Abel, who wrote the essay for the show, called Ray “a totara of the New Zealand art world”. She drew on the critic Rosalind Krauss, who wrote that all contemporary sculpture is concerned with the idea of passages, and it’s certainly true of Ray’s. These works hold time in several ways at once: curvilinear lines that unfold horizontally or close into continuous compositions, evoking the evolution of form in space. There’s the time it takes to view them, too — each staged as an encounter, designed to be discovered reflecting or deflecting light, throwing shadows, changing shape. And there’s the long, slow time of their making.

The lockdowns of the previous two years proved productive: more time to make work, and when materials ran short, Ray relished the excuse to experiment. His workshop looks out over the Hauraki Gulf, and the big piece of that period was a monolithic tubular steel work — one continuous curve folding into an elegant nest, animated by the light, changing as you walk around it. The plan, he said at the time, was to leave it outside for six months and let the surface mature to a russet brown: the sculpture transforming itself one more time.

The relief Voyage, which gave the show its name, loops and weaves across the wall in a kind of dance, its green surface setting an energetic tempo — a nod to the early modernist Umberto Boccioni, who wanted to translate the dynamism of machines into art. Ray is an abstract artist, not a representational one; what he’s after is the intangible. The vivid colour and reflective surfaces were new in his reliefs, and they change how the work behaves: Abel read them as a reflection of the pace of contemporary life, and a gesture towards an optimistic future.

Adapted from Sian Abel’s essay for Sanderson, October 2022.