In my early twenties, I met the girl I would later marry.
We’d travelled in the same social circles for a while, but she was seeing a mate of mine, and I'd always considered her way out of my league. I didn't think I had a league. She split up with my mate (who was, it turns out, a very bad man) and a few months later our eyes met on a crowded dance floor. A tale as old as time. We’ve been together ever since.
Leighanne lived with her mother in Peterlee, on the Sunny Blunts estate. We spent a lot of time at her house in those first few years. I got to know and love Peterlee in all its oddball anti-beauty. Once we started a family, we ended up living in Peterlee - and stayed there for around a decade, during which time my connection to the place deepened.
Peterlee was designed as one of England's ‘New Towns’. However, the powers that be took a slightly different approach to its design and planning, bringing in an artist to lead part of the project. Victor Pasmore designed the now famous brutalist landmark, the Apollo Pavilion, which sits proudly in a housing estate of Pasmore’s design, Sunny Blunts.
As I have a history working in architecture, Peterlee has always been a huge source of inspiration. I grew up in a village dominated by terraced housing, so Peterlee - and especially Sunny Blunts - with its huge, communal green spaces and its houses placed sporadically across it - seemed very utopian. Which was Pasmore’s intent. However, I think what also interested me was the fact that Peterlee, then and now, is far from the thriving utopia it was planned to be.
The idea was for Peterlee to be the hub of the East Durham mining metropolis, with the neighbouring collieries as its spokes. She-who-shall-not-be-named put an end to that when she put an end to the pits, so Peterlee was in many ways built for a purpose, but in the end - not fit for purpose.
We moved on from Peterlee eventually, but I’ve continued to be quite attached to it. I get quite nerdy about it, to be honest.
At the beginning of 2024, I saw a call out from Building Culture for artists from or connected to Peterlee for part of their place lab project. I jumped at the chance. I met Carlo from Building Culture and I was introduced to a group of artists and organisations in and around Peterlee, many of which were Peterlee nerds like myself.
Around that time Building Culture, in conjunction with No More Nowt were working on putting together an exhibition with work responding to Sunny Blunts, as part of the 7th International Biennial of Non-objective Art. The show had work from local and national artists and was held at a meanwhile space in Peterlee town centre. The exhibition ticked all of my boxes and more - amazing local artists showing work that linked to Pasmore and Sunny Blunts, so I jumped in the car to visit the first opportunity I got.
The exhibition was co-curated by Deb Covell and Theresa Poulton, who both had work in the show. By chance, when I popped my head in, Deb was invigilating. We got chatting and ended up on the subject of contemporary art in communities like Peterlee; the challenges of showing in what is a very deprived area. While we were chatting several people walked past, peered in, and kept walking. I got the sense that people immediately felt that art, in general, wasn't for them, and contemporary art definitely wasn't.
We were talking about the local artists that were showing, and that perhaps there was an undiscovered seam of talent in the area when an elderly couple walked in. The gentleman, Ron, introduced himself and his wife, Lorna. Deb asked them if they were interested in art and Ron responded with something along the lines of “I’m an artist myself. I’ve only ever sold one painting though, and that was to my son - and he’s never paid me for it”. Ron was very funny and proceeded to talk to Deb and me about his upbringing, and how he studied art but then dropped it for a career that would support his family. Deb mentioned that she would love to see some of his work, and Ron pulled out his phone and proceeded to swipe through several pictures of his work.
There were pointillist interpretations of sunsets over the tyne. There were minimalist representations of French villas and painterly renderings of local landmarks. They were all amazing.
I remember Deb and I exchanged a wide-eyed glance at one another. My jaw was hanging slack and the hairs on my arms were standing on end. It was a surreal moment. We had just been talking about the potential of undiscovered local artistic talent and in walks Ron.
After taking a picture for Instagram I parted ways, feeling very inspired and invigorated by a short time at the exhibition, surrounded by such amazing work, and chatting to Deb, Ron and Lorna.
I posted the picture of Ron on Instagram, along with a caption on the exchange with Ron and how it was a great example of the work local arts organisations did that bring people out, and together - and, offhandedly, that I would love to see a Ron Lapworth exhibition happen. Soon after Carlo got in touch, asking if perhaps I would like to explore making my offhanded suggestion a reality. I practically bit his hand off.
I had no idea how to get in touch with Ron of course, but it turns out that social media did its thing. One of Ron's relatives had seen the post, and told him about it, and in response Ron created an Instagram account and sent me a message. We got chatting, and over the course of a few months - managed to pin him down for a visit. Carlo and I visited Ron at home, where he filled his spare room with his paintings for us to look at. We learned more about Ron, his past and his family - and saw his wonderful paintings up close.
Ron agreed to the idea of having an exhibition of his work and I started trying to pull together a shortlist of paintings I thought would work well. This was my first attempt at formal curation and production, though it wasn't until afterwards that I realised that's what I was doing. To me, it was just ‘organising’. With the support of Carlo we secured an empty unit in Castledene shopping centre, just a few doors up from where I'd first met Ron, and agreed a date. I worked with No More Nowt to arrange for the paintings to be framed (by the amazing local craftsman Howarth Bespoke). I designed a poster (using a lovely portrait local photographer Andy Martin had taken of Ron) to promote the exhibition and wrote some accompanying text to be displayed on a board in the space.
In the run-up to the exhibition, it had been tricky to get in touch with Ron. He’d been in and out of hospital, and when I did eventually get a message from him he explained why; he’d been diagnosed with Cancer.
This came as a shock to everyone. Ron was still very enthusiastic about making the exhibition a reality, and I doubled down on my efforts. It did add an extra layer to things; initially, my aims for the exhibition were to showcase Ron's amazing work, promote local artistic talent and hopefully bring the community together to celebrate it. Ron had been told that even with chemotherapy however, he didn't have a lot of time left.
I decided to call the exhibition ‘Full Circle’. This was a nod to Ron's journey; starting out as an artist, in Peterlee, travelling the world, and ending up back in Peterlee, showing his art. The exhibition was due to take place between Thursday 11th and Thursday 18th July 2024. Everyone helped out. In the days before the exhibition, we didn't know if Ron would make it - he'd been really poorly and by that time was confined to a wheelchair, his health had deteriorated really quickly. On the day of the install Carlo and I hung the work. Bizarrely, a group of blokes wearing suits walked past and peered in while we were drilling holes in the wall. A few minutes later the security guard from the shopping centre showed up saying we had to stop what we were doing; that we couldn't drill holes in the wall. Seemingly the suits had been from the company who owned the centre and objected to us drilling holes in the walls. We negotiated, and after a brief but excruciating wait, ended up getting the green light - as long as we promised to fill the holes in after the exhibition (which was the plan all along). Not the ideal scenario a matter of hours before the private view…but a learning experience nonetheless.
That evening we rolled up the shutter and, thankfully, people started arriving. And kept coming. Ron made it, along with his whole family (of which there are many). The room was filled with joy. It honestly couldn't have gone any better. Ron was overwhelmed, overjoyed, and a bit tipsy by the end I think. Someone had arranged to bake him a huge cake with ‘congratulations on your first exhibition’ which was presented to him. There were tears. I hovered around the whole evening, picking up empty glasses and generally trying to conceal my own sense of being overwhelmed by it all. The whole community seemed to be out in droves, and to cap things off both Deb and Theresa made the trip too. Full circle.
I spent several of the days the exhibition was open invigilating. I have to say, despite the cold room and my usual tendency towards introversion, I enjoyed the experience immensely. I spoke to so many people who had come to see Ron's work as they either knew him or knew of him, or were just passing and liked the look of the paintings. Some were simply curious. Many had their own stories of abandoned dreams of being an artist. Some kept up the hobby, and a few suggested they might rekindle the hobby after seeing Ron's work. We had several hundred visitors through the doors that week, and lots of lovely messages in a guestbook which we presented to Ron shortly after the exhibition had closed.
I had a call from Lorna in August saying that Ron had passed away. I’m glad that we made the exhibition happen for him, and especially the private view with all his family there. Although I’d been expecting it to some extent, it was still a shock. I think for me it brought back a lot of thoughts and feelings around losing my Dad when I was quite young.
No More Nowt had asked local photographer and artist Rachel Deakin to come along to the private view and take some photographs. Rachel sent us the photos a week or so after the exhibition had wrapped up and they were gorgeous. She managed to capture the love in the room that night perfectly. Jess from No More Nowt floated the idea of making a photobook and asked me if I'd like to design it. Again, I jumped at the chance. The process was very emotional, somewhat stressful, but very rewarding. The book has turned out wonderfully, and I think it really does Ron’s work and Rachel's photographs justice.
I showed some work at an art fair as part of the Stockton Big Art Festival in July of 2024. Theresa Poulton (who co-curated the Sunny Blunts exhibition with Deb Covell) very kindly travelled across the Tyne, Wear and Tees to come and see my work and chat with me. As an emerging artist, coming into the art world quite late in life, it really meant a lot to me that someone like Theresa would come all that way specifically to see me and my work. We had a lot to talk about, and her visit was one of the highlights of an otherwise uneventful few days at my little booth.
We stayed in touch generally, and Theresa got in touch late in the year to see if I would like to show some work in an exhibition she was working on as part of her residency at Durham Sixth Form. I of course agreed; I was bowled over that she asked me. I’d assumed that it was a group show of some sort, but it turns out that it was a solo show - and I was to be a guest artist. Theresa’s exhibition explored the theme of threads through her own work, and I think that my link to the Sunny Blunts exhibition and via Ron was one such thread.
Theresa was showing the two pieces she made for the Sunny Blunts exhibition as part of the show, and had earmarked a corner of the gallery opposite those paintings for my work. While Theresa was happy for me to show existing work, it made sense to me to create new work for the show, and to explore my own thread. I decided to make two paintings in response to Pasmore, Sunny Blunts and Theresa's work.
The two works I made are called ‘Plans to Elevate’ and ‘Proposing to Exist’. Plans to Elevate, in its title and its content, is a reference to architecture, Pasmore and Peterlee. I made two paintings inspired by plans and elevations of Pasmore’s Apollo pavilion that I'd got my hands on, in an attempt to show the hope and aspirations Pasmore talked about as his inspiration for the Pavillion, and how I felt this was planned to be applied to project-Peterlee. I mounted these on another panel and added an abstraction of a site plan of Sunny Blunts as well as a traditional drawing scale. The single yellow square represents the house my wife grew up in and where we spent so many hours at the beginning of our relationship.
Proposing to exist is a view of the pavilion from above, in my usual style. I had the idea that the two pieces should contrast. One explores Pasmore’s planned, optimistic vision of sunny blunts, and the other depicts the reality; a deprived community with a brutalist monument at its centre, just trying to exist.
I’m not really happy with either of the pieces( I never am), but I wanted to try something new and push myself a little. Often experimentation does not lead immediately to the best results (but I’ll get there in the end).
I’d planned on writing two pieces originally. One reflecting on Ron’s exhibition, and one on the work for Theresa. As I started to make notes for each, I realised that they were both interconnected; part of the same story. A thread, a circle.
The whole experience has taught me a great deal. About community, culture, the power of art and about myself and my work. The thread outlined above started almost twenty years ago, and I hope that it will continue for twenty more. I’m finding, as I navigate the art world in my forties, that these threads are things to be cherished. They can be used to navigate, both forwards and back, but can also anchor us to what's important.