There are seven sheds spread through the garden of Ray and Susie’s smallholding. Positioned high on the granite spine of the west of Cornwall, buried in what was once a busy mining landscape, it seems at times when visiting that one has stepped into a folk tale.
Only a few have ever entered the sheds, and all those who have leave amazed by what they have seen and delighted to have been granted the rare opportunity. In the largest of the sheds, an old barn, is the core of ‘The Circus. This is a hugely complex interlaced sculpture, consisting of thousands of individually crafted parts, which cascade throughout the whole building, from the floor right up into the rafters.
A feature of ‘The Circus’ are a series of life sized plaster sculptures of clowns. Each built around a welded metal armature with extraordinary anatomical precision, and deftly painted to enhance their lifelike appearance, they still stand where they were first made over forty years ago.
Ray had begun ‘The Circus’ in 1975 and it preoccupied him until he suddenly abandoned the work on hearing of his father’s death in 1986. He closed the door of the barn, stepping away and leaving the vast sculpture, which spreads through two other sheds, unfinished.
Inside the cottage nearby is a room designated ‘The Drawing Room’, in which stands a planchest, the drawers of which are full of a series of Ray’s remarkable drawings. Often dark in nature, they include a large group of preparatory drawings for ‘The Circus’, a few of which are reproduced in the new book.