Ray Exworth spent six decades crafting remarkable sculptures stored in remote Cornish sheds, viewed by only a handful of people. His work remained hidden from the public until recently.
Exworth’s art reflects his childhood memories and wartime experiences, preserved in seven studio sheds and containers. Photographer Jem Southam’s book offers rare insight into this secret collection.
Ray Exworth spent six decades creating one of Britain’s most extraordinary bodies of sculpture – and almost nobody has seen it. Hidden inside a labyrinth of sheds on a remote Cornish smallholding, his vast, obsessive constructions have remained locked away from the world, visited only by a fortunate few. Even his wife Susie, 92, was largely kept out. “I could not visit without an invitation!” she recalls.
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Exworth, who died in 2015 aged 84, had just one major exhibition in his lifetime, at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1975. Since then, the man who might belong among Britain’s most notable artists has disappeared almost entirely. His works – sprawling, intricate and wildly ambitious, assembled from an array of salvaged materials – have remained exactly where he left them: filling seven studio sheds and a scattering of shipping containers, unseen.
A new book by photographer Jem Southam, Ray’s Sheds, provides unprecedented access to Exworth’s stunning work for the first time. Southam believes only 20 people have seen inside Ray’s sheds. His book is not only a detailed document of a exceptional art practice that may never otherwise see the light of day, but an intriguing inquiry into what it means to be an artist – and what the purpose of art is – when it is never publicly seen.
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Exworth was born in 1939 in Ipswich, the eldest of five sons. His father, Southam tells me, was a highly skilled but not well paid sandcaster, who would also make toys for his sons during the war. “Ray got his marvel at the skill and craft of making things from his father,” Southam says.
The family’s home was hit in a bombing raid and burned down in 1941; then their next home was also bombed. These traumatic wartime experiences left a mark on Exworth – his sculptures return again and again to childhood memories and objects: clowns, dolls, and even the garden at the family home his father rebuilt from scratch once they were able to return. Exworth made an exact one-to-one replica of the garden from memory, a 60ft by 30ft floor-based sculpture complete with forks, spades, lettuces, flowering roses and bamboo beanpoles – all made of beaten lead. The work, one of three similarly massive lead pieces by Exworth, doesn’t appear in Southam’s new book – it’s so huge that it’s stored away in a container on the smallholding.
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Southam first met Exworth in the 1980s. One day Southam received a phone call from the artist inviting him to come and take photographs of his work. “I don’t know how he had heard about me, but I went slightly reluctantly to his tiny cottage. He took me through the tangled garden to the first shed – and as soon as the door slid open and I looked inside, like anyone else who has been there, my jaw dropped. What was inside was astonishing. I knew I was in the presence of a remarkable artist.”
The first shed Southam encountered was known as the circus shed – a space vividly depicted in Southam’s photographs in the book, a sculptural environment (Exworth never referred to them as “installations”) stacked and piled from floor to ceiling with pieces crafted from whatever Exworth could get his hands on – plaster armatures, layered with newspaper and rags, metal, wood, textiles, glass, string and wax, all refined and finessed with ingenuity and skill. Full-size ringmasters, performers, horses, magicians – and a juggler with a frozen cascade of balls in the air are among the myriad figures in the wonderland. For the juggler’s balls, Exworth repurposed steel nails from wooden builders’ pallets, hammering them out and welding them together to create an arch, a painstaking problem-solving process that would have taken months. Exworth worked on The Circus six days a week for an entire decade.
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Exworth got the idea, Southam says, while working at the Meteorological Office (as part of his national service in the RAF), when he would pass through Piccadilly Circus regularly, at day and night. “Somehow that morphed into a real circus – wherever he started from, his imagination took over.”
Even Susie remembers being “awestruck by his work” the first time she entered the sheds, several years after Exworth started working in them. “I could not equate the man I knew in our daily life with the man he became when he entered the shed to work.” The photographs capture the low lighting and depth of the space, an unprecedented exploration of the endless mountains of works, some still in progress, partially covered in sheets.
Across the seven sheds, each with their own atmosphere and theme, are life size, lifelike figures and animals, as well as miniatures, tableaux of found objects, ladders, old papers, boxes, buckets, complex assemblages of forms and materials, some indecipherable and unfinished. The workshop shed shows the scale and breadth of Exworth’s technical acuity and thinking – everything from drills, jigsaws, sanders and glass cutters to grinders, putty and tiny paintbrushes.
Southam initially made 12 exposures on a plate camera for Exworth, for a grant application. The two became friends – but for the next 30 years, “no matter how much I tried, he would never let me in the sheds with a camera again”.
It was only after Exworth died that Southam approached Susie to ask if he could make a photographic record of the work in the sheds, as a way of preserving it. The book took 10 years to make – Southam first shot everything he could on a digital camera, which allowed him to squeeze into the tight corners of the packed sheds, “but I was dissatisfied with the pictures because they didn’t really show what it felt like to be inside these spaces, surrounded by this work”. He returned with a huge, 8×10 Victorian box-like camera and tripod, “with an extremely wide, almost freakish lens” that allowed him to capture the spaces in a more encompassing way.
Southam’s book includes around 60 pictures, as well as accounts of his personal experiences with Ray and in his sheds. There are many more works Southam couldn’t photograph or hasn’t included – such as 700 charcoal drawings Exworth made of the pair of blackbirds that visited the couple’s backdoor every day.
David Heseltine was Exworth’s long-term friend and former colleague at Falmouth School of Art – where Exworth was head of sculpture from 1959 to 1974. Heseltine remembers him as “well read and his art historical knowledge exhaustive. He found genius and inspiration in Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein, although his creative vision ran counter to the work of many of his contemporaries, who he thought lacked compassion.”
When Exworth eventually quit teaching to devote himself entirely to his practice, he seems to have had few ambitions beyond quietly tinkering away on his own in his sheds, working on his wild visions – that perhaps transported him back to happier times.
“He was reclusive and, although described as irascible to the Arts Council purchasing committee, he was sensitive, compassionate and passionately interested in people and all aspects of life,” Heseltine says. “He had absolute certainty about his vision, but an amazing humility about what it achieved.”
Ray’s Sheds, Heseltine adds, “is of course much more than an archival record and hugely important to Ray’s legacy. Given that the sculptures are almost immovable and that Ray was more concerned about making than promoting them, the book will be vital in introducing Ray’s work to a much wider audience, in acknowledging his importance, his contribution to 20th-century British art and establishing his rightful status as one of the truly original sculptors of our time.”
The book is also about the unique, unwavering dedication of an artist solely to his craft without pretension. “For me, he was a really genuine artist – solving problems about how to make things. He was engaged in the activity of making, and found that far more rewarding than presenting it. Ray was just engrossed every day in how to move forward and make something.”
As for Susie, she still goes into the sheds frequently – because, she says, “there is a strong feeling of Ray’s presence in each one”.
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