When Lost Works Find Their Way Back
Over the past few weeks (Dec 2025/Jan 2026) we’ve heard from Jon and Lyn Arnold, friends and colleagues of Doug from his Loughborough days in the early to mid-1980s.
What began as a simple message sharing old photographs quickly became something more meaningful: the rediscovery of a print Doug had given them over forty years ago.
Silkscreen Printing At Loughborough
The print, titled The Frighteners (c.1984), is a signed limited edition, numbered 18/25 and measuring 90 × 56 cm. Until now, it wasn’t recorded in our archive. Not lost in any dramatic sense, just quietly living its life on someone else’s wall. Exactly as art often does.
When pieces like this resurface, they help us do more than fill gaps in a list. They confirm titles, dates, edition sizes, and materials. They anchor work to real moments and relationships rather than memory alone. This is how archives are properly rebuilt, not through declarations, but through trust, patience, and people reaching out because they care.
*Artist Doug Kemp created this Silkscreen in the mid-1980s whilst teaching at Loughborough
What’s especially striking about exchanges like this is the generosity behind them. There is no expectation attached. No request for value or validation. Just a wish to reconnect, to share, and to make sure the work is known and remembered.
Alongside the print came photographs from that period. Teaching days, colleagues, nights out, moments that remind us that work is never made in isolation.
Loughborough College of Art in 1985 was not just a workplace but a shared environment of ideas, friendships, and long conversations. Prints were exchanged, not catalogued. Work moved hand to hand, not box to shelf.
We’re deeply grateful to Jon and Lyn for taking the time to get in touch, for sharing their photographs, and for helping piece together another part of Doug’s working life. Moments like this remind us that the work was never really lost. It was simply elsewhere, doing what it was meant to do.
If you have a piece, a photograph, or a memory connected to Doug’s work from earlier years, you’re always welcome to get in touch. These quiet returns matter more than people realise.
