Event category: Art

30 x 30 A Cornucopia

Poster for the 30 x 30 exhibition featuring three artworks and invitation text

This exhibition is inspired by the 2021 campaign of the River Stour Festival to encourage people to try and source all their food from a 30 mile radius for 30 days. The Stour Valley and the surrounding countryside are studded with producers of crucial foods.

Lillias August is a painter in watercolours who depicts humble objects, like beets and onions, with an attention that elevates them.

Ffiona Lewis draws in pastel and wash in her kitchen garden: Rose Stems, Shard Rows, Rhubarb, Rhubard.

Alan Turnbull is finishing a book on Van Gogh but in Lockdown made The Blackbirds Song and Winter Garden series of monotypes.

Jane Lewis usually uses landscape as a starting point for her calligraphic, abstract paintings but here the local wheat fields are clearly evident.

Ruth Philo’s paintings explore abstraction, emerging from experiences of place and walking.

Sarah Milne’s paintings of the Stour Valley landscape have become increasingly abstract in a wonderfully free and fluid way.

Tilly de Willebois is a great cook as well as a painter who closely observes her ingredients.

Autumn Printworks Exhibition at Mill Tye Gallery

A colourful stylised lino cut of a stag in a forest

A celebration of work by talented printmakers from the region, showcased in the gallery’s beautiful setting on the banks of the River Stour, right beside the picturesque Mill Pond, in Mill Tye.

Preview day: Saturday 4th September Gallery open from 11am to 7pm
Exhibition continues until Sunday 26th September

Open: Friday, Saturday and Sunday: 11:00 am to 4:00 pm. Entry is free, everyone welcome.
Open Bank Holidays: 11:00 am to 4:00 pm

For more information and to RSVP go to www.milltyegallery.co.uk/exhibitions

Bev Howe Exhibition at Mill Tye Gallery

A painting of a magpie surrounded by a myriad of things that it has collected

Mill Tye Gallery presents a collection of Bev Howe’s latest work.

Bev Howe graduated from Norwich School of Art in 1990 with a First Class Honours Degree in Illustration and has continued to paint and make ever since. Most recently, Bev has made finely detailed paintings on paper and board, using acrylic paints and inks. She cites her passion for colour and its power to affect mood as her greatest motivation to create her paintings.

Preview day: Saturday 4th September Gallery open from 11am to 7pm
Exhibition continues until Sunday 26th September

Open: Friday, Saturday and Sunday: 11:00 am to 4:00 pm. Entry is free, everyone welcome.
Open Bank Holidays: 11:00 am to 4:00 pm

For more information and to RSVP go to www.milltyegallery.co.uk/exhibitions

**NEW DATE** Time-out, responding to landscape with Terry Flower

A painting of a rolling road over hill with trees and clouds

One-day workshop beginning with short walk from artists studio to gather responses to the landscape: drawings, photos, found objects and words. These will form the basis for participants to create a small bookwork back in the studio.

Outline. The workshop will start with an introductory talk about the day ahead. Examples will be shown of the possible outcomes we might create to help fire the imagination. After the introductory talk we will take a short walk from the studio over to Belchamp Walter church. The purpose of the walk will be to gather responses in the form of words, images and small natural objects. These will be used as the basis, and stimulation, for a small bookwork produced under the guidance of Terry Flower back in the studio. The purpose of the day will not be to make refined outcomes, but small proposal/sketch/ book works to stimulate more refined artworks at some future date. The day will also provide students with a working methodology for the individual to use as a template for future personal responses to landscape.

Since graduating from Goldsmiths in 1986 I have been a committed teacher and practitioner, I divide my time equally between the two and feel one feeds into the other. My theme is landscape, which is explored through sculpture, photography and bookworks. My work is a prompt, encouraging the exploration of the landscape around us. No place is mundane, each has some magic to offer and rewards those with time enough to pause and engage. One does not need an exotic location to begin, it’s out there in the most ordinary of places happening every day.

Shore – Aspects of the Liminal

6 pieces of artwork on the themese Shore

SHORE – ASPECTS OF THE LIMINAL at North House Gallery, Manningtree featuring work by Neil Bousfield, Simon Carter, Daisy Cook, Luke Elwes, Fergus Hare, Melvyn King, Ffiona Lewis and Jasper Startup.

Artists, and non-artists, have always been attracted to the shore, especially in the UK, where it is never far away. Whether sandy beach, salt marsh, mud, rocks or man-made seawalls and quays, the transitional space between the land and the water has a fragile mutability which inspires intentions beyond the merely representational. Now, with increasing concern about climate change, artists are justifiably seeing the shore as a barometer of even greater change that requires a transition in the relationship of humans with their environment.

Neil Bousfield’s Home and Place engravings explore the joys of the beach at the same time as the vulnerability of the east Norfolk coast. The new, larger multiple block relief print, Doggerland Walker, references the Holocene landscape buried under the North Sea: a gentle warning.

Simon Carter works almost exclusively in the in-between space that is neither sea nor dry land, a wild space inhabited by birds. His quick drawings from the seawalls across the saltings of the Walton backwaters are transfigured in the studio to images that include all the information but exist only in paint.

Daisy Cook’s paintings and collages have become increasingly abstract in recent years, a joyful interplay of simple geometric shapes, but still discernable here is the sun over a seawall or a tree by the shore and the colours are always delicate and subtle.

Luke Elwes continues his Waterline series of works on paper, each one produced over the course of a day as the sea water floods the creaks and channels of the salt marshes of the east coast. The light on the surface of the water is recorded as well as hints of what has been, albeit temporarily, erased.

Fergus Hare had access to his local Sussex beach during lockdown, but as often with his work, his beach scenes, although apparently minutely observed, strangely seem to come from another, earlier time and evoke unexpected associations in the viewer.

Melvyn King’s principal sightlines for his paintings are shore to shore across the Stour estuary, tracking the busy flow of shipping in and out of Harwich and Felixstowe, and from the sea shore on the other side of the Harwich peninsular, out to the far horizon.

Ffiona Lewis paints waves breaking on the rocks South Devon coast and views through pine trees of the Deben and Alde estuaries. Her Flotsam series are calligraphic drawings of the skeletons of the less fortunate beech and sycamore trees that have succumbed to the erosion of the waves.

Jasper Startup’s sculpture is all about the nature of wood. He uses found materials, often sea-weathered from the shore, as a starting point, each piece being a search for the identity of form. Some pieces are organised by number, others based on a feeling or character that comes to light during the making process.

More information at www.northhousegallery.co.uk

Archontoula Tsatsoulaki

Photograph of 'Unravelling My Secret Message', a book bound by Andreas Maroulis

Archontoula Tsatsoulaki Unravelling my secret paths.

North House Gallery is delighted to present a show of textile art by Archontoula Tsatsoulaki, work which has grown out of her MA degree show at Chelsea College of Arts in 2019, where her presentation and personality shone out from her contemporaries. Equally noticeable was her thick mane of long black hair, which, as it transpires, she uses in her work.

The focus of Archontoula’s practice is to understand the secret messages, symbols and codes in the patterning of clothes. For her main installation she collected her (naturally shed) hair, transformed it into a yarn and wove it with natural materials such as wool or cotton into a long textile grid. Recalling a map of an urban grid, it represents a map of her own secret thoughts and symbols from her wanderings through London.

North House Gallery website

Norman Ackroyd: New Work

This exhibition of etchings by Norman Ackroyd CBE RA, his twelfth biennial solo show at North House Gallery,
includes two of his annual collections: Reading the Landscape, 2019, and Lockdown, 2020, as well as the small series of Lockdown Rainbow etchings and 20 independent prints, large and small, from the last two years.

The show is hung but the gallery is closed because of COVID restrictions. Please see the website www.northhousegallery.co.uk for a film and all the images which can be ordered unframed. Contact gallery 01206 392717

Flatford Nature Day

Seasonal, nature based activities such as pond dipping, spoon carving, minibeast hunting, arts & crafts, and river trips.

£3 per child