Zenith

Zenith explored motion and transformation in Ray Haydon’s sculpture: spiralling rings of mahogany, strips of copper, free-standing Flux works that ask the viewer to move around them, and a new corten steel work, Zenith, that took the sculpture in a more architectural direction.

Whether mahogany spiralling in rings or copper composed in strips, these works draw the eye along a rhythmic path with no fixed start or end point — momentum built into something standing still. The free-standing Flux works add the viewer’s own movement to the rhythm. The forms were growing more complex, still drawn from the natural environment and developed in organic, asymmetrical ways; the show also included the copper Fusion wall works and Elements, a mahogany wall installation.

Zenith, a new work in corten weathering steel, took things somewhere new: a more architecturally active composition, pointed steel lances fused into something chaotic yet balanced, motion pushing in several directions at once rather than one controlled sweep.

Ray doesn’t draw. He goes straight from the idea of a form to modelling it in three dimensions, piecing shapes together in response to what he has imagined — his attention on the engineering problems each new design raises more than on refining aesthetic choices. He isn’t a formally trained artist; the skills come from decades of industrial design, and where no method existed he built the machines and techniques to make the work exactly as imagined. That refusal to compromise the idea for the sake of convenience is where the new work keeps coming from.