Fantastic Secret Artist Exhibition held At Rainham Hall.

By Ruth Kettle-Frisby – Guest Writer and Community Activist

Ruth is passionate about fostering positive change within the local community and regularly contributes insights and stories to The Havering Daily.

The Secret Artist exhibition – displayed in the beautiful Georgian Hayloft at Rainham Hall – is a cultural highlight in Havering, lifting the lid from a veritable treasure trove, bursting with vibrancy and poignancy. Elevated where they belong on plinths and gallery walls, a series of delightful and thought-provoking works celebrate interwoven stories of Rainham life and beyond.

This year’s exhibition was co-curated by House and Gardens Manager at Rainham Hall, Jude Merritt, and Rainham artists Babs Thwaites and Thomas Lemon. It’s important work: uprooting and synthesising the diverse talent that simmers away, all too often enigmatically (with notable exceptions which those of us in the know are quite used to seeing out and about!) behind closed Rainham doors.

Visitors were treated to an array of styles and multi-media techniques:

Peter Smith’s dynamic oil paintings captured celebrities in their distorted cultural contexts; while Tony Gladman’s arresting undulating brushstrokes evoke terror as well as tender kinship on the front lines during World War 1.

There were bold geometric woodblock prints by Thomas Lemon, exploring colour, shape and pattern to striking effect;and intricate watercolours by Mary Thomson, ‘Crane’, ‘Dragonfly’ and ‘Chameleon’ to captivate and enchant.

Digital photography and graphics also make an appearance, with Sarah Trew’s playful ‘Starbar’; and Marie McGlaughlin’s nighttime city photography attributes a hidden colour spectrum to moonlit London landmarks.

Repurposed materials were used to startling effect in Dennis Gibson’s ‘Skip Dragon’ from salvaged and reclaimed materials, and Kevin Foster’s ‘Table’ sculpted from discarded wood from skips. Abstract salvaged denim was transformed into rich textile landscapes by Vicki Griffith; and Babs Thwaites’ entirely white pieces crafted from yarn hailing all the way from Shetland, invoked disguised sounds of silence on exposure to torchlight, whereupon delicately enigmatic beetles and hidden feelings, struggles and heartache emerged. Incidentally, both Vicki and Babs are living artworks in their own right; their work never confined to picture frames, and always worn with style!

Themes of death, war, trauma and social alienation are contraposed with nostalgia, childhood, and treasured science fiction. With his boundless imagination and creativity, Stuart Scott’s tiny Star Wars figurines are shot in emotive, action-packed scenes that harness perspective to give them formidable appearances; while childhood whimsy and curiosity are invitingly incapsulated in elaborate Victorian-style junk journals by artist Coral Jeffery.

My favourite of all was Mark Stewart’s ‘Another Day in Paradise’: a magnificently detailed, gut-punching depiction of flats on a council estate, the likes of which are dotted across the UK. They loom invisibly large, signalling poverty, deprivation and desperation in a confusion of political absurdities; tangled culture wars and ensuing crises of meaning, identity and dignity. 

The Secret Artist was a joy to behold and experience, and it’sabundantly clear that the appetite for Rainham art in Havering can only grow from here.

Ruth Kettle-Frisby

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