When bronze bends beyond reason

Francee Haydon
Oct 17
4 min read

Soul: Ray Haydon's Monument to Curved Space

Ray Haydon's largest commission to date found its permanent home in a private Auckland garden. Ray spent six months transforming flat bronze bars into Soul, it stands as a 2.4-meter testament to what happens when engineering meets instinct.

The numbers tell part of the story: 140 kilograms of bronze. Custom tooling designed for impossible bends. Every weld calculated for a century of exposure. But numbers can't capture what happens when you stand in front of it.

Site as Muse

Soul wasn't created in isolation. The sculpture responds directly to its location in a rounded garden bed encircled by driveway, positioned opposite the client's residence. Haydon's signature sinuous forms echo the garden's curved architecture while creating striking tension against the native plantings surrounding it.

This is bronze that will live. As the patina deepens over decades, as the garden matures around it, Soul will be transformed, year by year, not despite the elements, but because of them.

The Line That Creates Space

In 1925, Paul Klee published his Pedagogical Sketchbook at the Bauhaus, introducing a concept that would ripple through modern art for generations: "a line is a dot that went for a walk."[1] Klee described the first category of line as "an active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal. A walk for a walk's sake."[2] It's this idea that the a line as living movement rather than static mark and this is exactly what Dr Andrew Paul Wood invokes when writing about Ray Haydon's work.[1] But Haydon doesn't simply take Klee's line for a walk. He does something more architecturally radical: his lines don't just move through space, they sculpt it.

"Simple flowing lines," Haydon calls them, though anyone who has watched him bend 140 kilograms of bronze knows there's nothing simple about the execution. What matters in his practice is that he's actively "painting" the air with materials to fabricate constructions in space, as negative space defined by the solid objects that surround it.[3] This places Haydon in direct conversation with the Russian Constructivists, particularly Naum Gabo, who used time and space as construction elements, making solid matter unfold into something beautifully surreal and otherworldly. Gabo was preoccupied with representing negative space that was "released from any closed volume" or mass, and known for famously using nylon filament in his Linear Construction works to create voids or interior spaces as "concrete" as the elements of solid mass.[4]

In their 1920 "Realistic Manifesto," Gabo and his brother asserted that geometric principles should be the basis for sculpture, advocating the use of transparent materials to define volumes of empty space instead of solid mass.[5]

Haydon has internalized this philosophy but translated it into his own material language. Where Gabo worked with nylon and Perspex to make emptiness visible, Haydon uses bronze's weight and permanence to frame the air itself. His pieces retain a lyricism and freedom of line that evoke a sense of movement and velocity, while celebrating the technical process that goes into their making.[6] Soul embodies this philosophy completely. Its twisted forms don't just occupy the garden, every twist is choreographing how you experience it. The sculpture invites circumnavigation, promising that what you see from the driveway will morph entirely as you walk around to the house. The bronze curves frame views of native plantings, creating windows that weren't there before. Stand close and you see the weld marks, the evidence of hand and heat. Step back and the negative space dominates, through the piece the voids become the sculpture.

Haydon describes his work as unlocking "the kinetic rhythms of air, movement and time."[7] This isn't poetic overreach. Soul literally changes as you move, as light shifts, as seasons alter the garden around it. The sculpture doesn't just sit in space, it orchestrates it, activating the garden as a stage for perception itself.

Klee's line went for a walk. Gabo's line created constructivist space. Haydon's line, bends beyond reason, twisted, welded, calculated for a century. All while anchoring itself with 140 kilograms of bronze in Auckland soil. Ray is not just following in the footsteps of modernist masters. He's taking their ideas for a walk of his own.

The Hand Behind the Work

Every section of Soul was hand-bent by Haydon using tooling he created specifically for this commission. At an age when most would be winding down, he's scaling up, refusing to let physical limitations dictate artistic ambition.

The installation took place Wednesday at the private Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland residence, where Soul now stands as both sculpture and garden architecture, art object and living monument.

For Ray, this isn't a capstone. It's a declaration.

Interested in commissioning Ray Haydon? Visit sanderson.co.nz/artists/35-ray-haydon