Jem Southam: ‘Ray’s Sheds’ book launch
11 July 2026
“Photography offers a way to see inside the sheds and this book a means for his remarkable sculptures to reach a much wider audience.” — Jem Southam
Kestle Barton is pleased to host the launch of Ray’s Sheds, a new publication by photographer Jem Southam, on Saturday 11 July, 2–5pm. The afternoon will include drinks in the garden and a talk in the studio. Sarah Gillespie’s exhibition Birded and Eyed will also be on show in the gallery.
Ray’s Sheds is a substantial new publication bringing together photographs, texts and design by Jem Southam. The 120-page softback volume, published in an edition of 450, contains around 50 plates made from 10×8 inch analogue negatives alongside contextual photographs and fifteen short texts. Printed by Narayana Press in Denmark, the book is produced in a large-format portrait edition (275 x 323 mm). A special edition, accompanied by a signed 10×8 digitally printed contact sheet, will also be available.
The book centres on the studio sheds of sculptor Ray Exworth (1939–2015), where he worked in relative isolation for almost fifty years. From 1967 until his death, Exworth developed an extraordinary body of sculptural work using plaster, wood, concrete, lead, wax, textiles, paper, string and found materials. Although he produced only a small number of finished sculptures, each incorporated a vast accumulation of objects and materials into complex and densely layered wholes.
During his lifetime Exworth rarely exhibited his work publicly. In 1975 he held a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, while later lead works were shown at Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro. Much of the work, however, remained within the sheds themselves — spaces so crowded with objects, tools, fragments and unfinished forms that they became inseparable from the sculptures they contained. Access to the sheds was limited and few people were ever able to see the work in person.
Jem Southam first visited Ray Exworth’s studios in 1983, having been invited to photograph the sheds for a grant application. Reflecting on that first encounter, Southam recalls recognising immediately that he was “in the company of an extraordinary artist.” He became close friends with Ray and his wife Susie over the following decades, although Ray remained deeply protective of the sheds and rarely allowed photography inside them.
Following Ray’s death in 2015, Southam returned to the studios with Susie Exworth’s support to make a more extensive photographic record. The resulting photographs form both a document of the sheds themselves and a way of encountering works that are unlikely ever to leave them. As Southam has noted, photography offers “a means for his remarkable sculptures to reach a much wider audience.”
Kestle Barton has maintained a long association with the work of both Ray Exworth and Jem Southam. In 2011, A Shutter Came Down brought together Exworth’s sculptures, boxes and drawings alongside Southam’s photographs of The Circus, one of Ray’s most extraordinary studio spaces. In 2016, Kestle Barton presented Ray’s Sheds: The Hidden Work of Ray Exworth, an exhibition devoted to Southam’s expanded photographs of the sheds. In 2021 Naomi Frears’ moving image work Finding Ray part III continued this exploration of the atmosphere of the studios and the creative and domestic life shared by Ray and Susie Exworth.
Alongside his continuing engagement with Ray Exworth’s work, Jem Southam is internationally recognised for his landscape photography and has exhibited widely in Britain and internationally. Kestle Barton presented his exhibition Birds Rivers Rain in 2019, and Southam remains one of Kestle Barton’s Associate Artists.
The launch of Ray’s Sheds continues a longstanding conversation between artist, photographer and place, and offers a rare insight into an extraordinary and largely unseen body of work.
