This is a story decades in the making and years in the telling.
It’s set on a hidden smallholding in the far west of Cornwall, where two lovers spent their lives, one of them a sculptor of genius.
Ray and Susie Exworth met in 1958 at the Royal College of Art, Ray in his fourth year as a student, Susie visiting with a friend. Just few days later they had fallen in love and in August 1959, the day after Ray graduated, they married and left for Cornwall on a motorbike, carrying with them a dream and their few possessions.
Ray set up and ran the sculpture department at Falmouth School of Art, leaving in 1969 to devote his life to his sculpture. By then they had bought the cottage they stayed in the rest if their lives, and Ray had begun to forge his monumental works. For fifty years he laboured away in a series of sheds scattered through their garden, making work so complex it became a challenge to for anyone other than him to simply comprehend. He exhibited in London just the once, at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1975.
One afternoon in September 1983 Ray rang Jem Southam asking him to come and take a few photographs for a grant application he was making. On opening the door of the first shed Jem stood spellbound, in awe, a few negatives were made and somehow, Ray, Susie and Jem became friends. Jem and his camera though were never allowed in the sheds again, for Ray they were places of private sanctuary, where he quietly toiled away, day after day, year after year, until he died in January 2015.
Jem then approached Susie about the idea of making an archival photographic record of what Ray left behind, and this new book from ‘raft’ is the result.