Meg Buick

Meg’s pieces for Under the Laurels explore the motif of a single figure within a landscape, whether represented by a person, an animal, or a solitary tree. This approach speaks to themes of solitude, simplicity, and the sublime. Her ability to reflect ambivalence—a sense of beauty and loss—is deeply influenced by the environmental crises of our time, making her work both poignant and relevant. We caught up with meg to discover more about her life and influences.

Meg Buick, Under the Boughs, Egg tempera on paper, 50 x 70 cm, 2024

Meg, Your work often reflects a balance between beauty and a sense of unease, particularly in your portrayal of the ‘natural world’. How does this duality come through in your pieces for the Under the Laurels exhibition?

 Meg- It’s not something I set out to explore in my paintings, but I think it emerges. It’s impossible for anyone who is following the mass scale destruction of the environment to look at the so called 'natural world' without some sense of loss. But it’s also a huge source of beauty inspiration and solace, and I think the ambivalence I feel comes across in the work. All of these pieces explore the motif of figure in landscape - I think I’ve always been interested in the motif of the single figure, sometimes with something standing in for the figure - another conscious being like a bird or a horse - or sometimes a different singular motif like a tree or a house. The single figure could be seen as lonely, or isolated but I think I’m more drawn to its potential to suggest solitude, simplicity, or an experience of the sublime. 

You’ve experimented with various media, from painting to etching and lithography. Can you tell us more about the techniques you use and how they come into play?

  Meg- really happy to just tack between materials, I think they all feed into each other. I’m a painter really, and when I go into printmaking I can tell that I lack some of the basic patience and attention to process that makes for a very good technical printmaker, but I get so hooked on the end result that I stick it out for a while , and eventually give in to it, and it teaches me to be a more patient and virtuous maker! Then suddenly I get fed up and go back to painting, but the marks and quality of the prints inform the painting process. 

At the moment I work a lot with monotype and egg tempera, using them as a ‘ground’ for pastel and pencil and oil paint and other mediums. As well as the practical advantage of fast drying times and low toxicity, I am interested in Nancy Spero’s rejection of oil paint as the male, canonical medium, too heavy with the patriarchal history of painting. I am also interested in the historical significance of egg tempera, as one of the earliest painting materials, and the way in which the material itself can connect the works to the ancient origins of painting. 

Meg Buick in the studio

Your images are sometimes described as ‘ghostly’ or ‘fragmentary.’ How does this style of partial revelation or obscurity tie into the broader themes of the Under the Laurels exhibition?

  Meg- thing I find interesting about Carrington’s work is how varied it is. She doesn’t seem to have settled on a particular style or subject in the way that the art market generally favours and rewards. I think I read that she stopped signing her pictures at some point, which could imply that she freed herself from the need of external validation - I don’t know enough about her to know if that is true and I don’t want to romanticise her life - it sounds like she was fairly unhappy and it wasn’t an easy time to be a woman. But that kind of rejection of convention seems connected in a way to the rejection of the art world pressure to produce a very logical, coherent body of work . She could paint in a kind of classical realist style but chose to work with glass and silver foil, she seemed willing to let go of some of her training, and that’s interesting to me. 

My work is probably fragmentary, I don’t want it to have an obvious narrative, but to remain connected, more like a series of stanzas in a poem. So I am very interested in this element of her work, the separated moments and connections between things, without trying to pin everything to the same narrative arch. 

Meg Buick,The Crossing, Monotype and pastel on paper, 50 x 70 cm, 2023

Thomas Compton

Thomas Compton is a contemporary artist whose work bridges analogue and digital techniques to craft imagery that feels both modern and timeless. Through meticulous silkscreen printing and experimental layering, his pieces blend personal history, mythology, and storytelling, questioning the reliability of memory and the evolution of narratives over time. Influenced by folk customs, the Arts & Crafts movement, and artists like Paul Nash and Dora Carrington, Compton’s work explores the interplay between intimate personal mythologies and broader cultural archetypes. Recurring motifs, such as the wooden horse, serve as symbols of familial memory and myth, inviting viewers to reflect on the fluidity of time, narrative, and identity.

Your work often combines digital and analogue processes in ways that feel both modern and timeless. Could you walk us through your image-making process for the prints featured in "Under the Laurels," and how it relates to this blend of methods?

Thomas - That’s quite the compliment, thank you! The intention for a project determines many of the process based choices made during image-creation. For this series of prints, I alternated between functional and more freeform approaches to making. Drafting work by hand, scanning and manipulating these alongside haptic digital textures within evolving compositional frameworks sets precedent for the linear sense of narrative necessitated by the graphic novel. This more structured approach initially positions my medium of choice, silkscreen, as a functional output, but printed work I’ve found, thrives within looser constraints and a wilfulness to let the process enact its own agency away from one’s own act of implicit creation.‘Turin Spring Dance’ borrows layers from different artworks in a manner that generates compositional interest beyond my initial capacity to have crafted its exacting effect. A cyclical quality in reading the imagery suspends the initially linear narrative and opens broader possibilities of perception.

The narrative behind "The De Chirico Horse" is both deeply personal and semi-fictional, weaving in family history with a sense of myth. How did you balance fact and fiction in creating these pieces, and what draws you to stories that blur the lines between the two?

Thomas - I think the resonance of a story like this to people is in its recounting. We, who have close family and/or friends have all more than likely heard anecdotal word of mouth stories that just naturally filter down. These stories morph with their retelling and it opens up epistemological and metaphysical questions around the nature of truth. Balancing fact and fiction, although a useful narrative mechanism doesn’t necessarily capture the aura of a story, which I find a far more engaging pursuit.

Thomas Compton, Turin Spring Dance, Screen Print.

Can you talk a little about your studio and your working process?

Thomas - A piece of kit essential to my practice is the silkscreen printing bench. It takes up a lot of room in the studio, emblematic of its importance to my practice. A hand pulled mechanical arm holding a squeegee pulls ink across paper, finessing exact pressure and movement over each pass. Silkscreen requires competency of the technical variables, which are wide and borderline alchemical. My approach to the printing setup is meticulous and requires patience, but beneath a squeegee’s blade, artworks that sometimes have taken months to produce are realised. Beyond the setup, within a work’s creation, I like to weave in opportunities to experiment, to stumble upon moments of the unexpected.

As an artist influenced by folk customs, myth, and the Arts & Crafts movement, how do you see these elements playing out in "Under the Laurels," especially in conversation with the works of Paul Nash and Dora Carrington?

Thomas - Just as Carrington and Nash are conduits to these themes in their own works, the group of artists gathered in “Under the Laurels” have likewise infused their own implicit sense of relationship to the landscape and figures that inhabit them. Nash’s works more overtly suggest that nature, mythology, and the past are inextricably linked, and the landscape itself becomes a backdrop where ancient myths and modern concerns coexist as a repository of memory. There is something characteristically soothing in this calcifying attitude, but I find myself as engaged by the sense of beauty and focus on the intimate that Carrington breathes into the relationships and the explicit inner world present in her works; they are personal mythologies that she creates. My sense of practice is almost certainly a mediation of these ideas, a sentiment perhaps shared by my fellow exhibitors.

Your art is shaped by a fascination with the "provenance and degradation of story through “authorship." In the prints from your graphic novel, how do you see this theme coming to life? - What do you hope viewers take away from these layers of inherited and evolved narrative?

I’ve found that people typically share deep lines of affinity to stories felt personally or by those they care for. It provides a semblance of identity, that I am one of many before me. The provenance of the graphic novel’s story starts with my great- grandfather, but by nature of degradation; the story not being written down and being retold down the family line three generations now, the malleability of its truth comes into question. Does this fact change my feeling of affection for the story? No, the imperfection of its degradation makes it more relatable. The same can be said of the prints, they are vignettes of layering that give semblance to what might have happened, not what absolutely must have.

Thomas Compton, Ferrara Evening Dance, Screen Print

Much like the landscape paintings of Carrington, the imagery in "The De Chirico Horse" feels both dreamlike and rooted in history, with anonymous figures moving through expansive landscapes. Can you speak to the symbolism of the wooden horse and how it connects to the emotional and narrative core of these pieces?

Thomas - The aura of the carving, much like the creation of the prints illuminates and is ode to the story encapsulated by its presence. The carving serves as motif, both as spiritual guide to the familial recount of the mythology garnered in the graphic novel, but also as homage to the animal’s presence in many De Chirico works. I too seem to gravitate back to the presence of the horse in my work somewhat subconsciously. A new piece in the works, rather in the lineage of Nash’s lithograph ‘The Landscape of the Megaliths’ (1937), but rather more intimate in nature and aligned to Carrington’s ‘Fairground at Henley Regatta’ (1921) focuses on the mythology around the stone barrow Wayland’s Smithy. The legend recounts the blacksmith turned farrier god Wayland shoeing horses tethered outside the confines of the barrow on being left a silver coin.

Freya Croissant

Your work seems to invite us into the dream-states of childhood and play. Could you share what memories or experiences inspired this sense of wonder and exploration in your latest work?

Freya- In the last four years I've been on a bit of a journey exploring my relationship to Cornwall in an ongoing body of work ‘Remembering Places Once Trodden’. Conjuring feelings of grief intertwined with memories of childhood naivety and fearlessness. These pieces serve as both reflections and recordings of the North Cornwall countryside the landscapes that shaped my early years. So I’m certainly thrilled this is how you have seen my work. 

Your work often blends the natural world with intimate, personal spaces. How do you approach translating these elements from your surroundings into the pieces you’ve created for Under the Laurels?  

Freya- Since moving to Brighton I have been trying to draw and paint from my immediate surroundings more. I think this is because I’m much more inspired by being near the South Downs coastline. In my painting ‘Tulips outside St Peter’s’ this was a turning point for including man made structures into my images. I would usually shy away from anything rigid and man made but there has been something really pulling me to the repeat patterns of fencing. It’s such a silly little thing but I have been really enjoying looking at it!

Tulips Outside St Peters, Oil and bleach on stretched canvas

  You’ve mentioned before that walking and being in nature are essential to your creative process, is there locations you work from regularly?

 Freya- Since moving from London to Brighton this year I have been drawing lots around the downs. I have family in North Cornwall so growing up I spent a lot of time down there. There was one particular walk called ‘lovers walk’, winding down from my grandparents bungalow high up on the cliffs to the beach. Passing through farmland, a shallow river, little woodland areas and opening up onto the slate clad beach.

 Could you talk about light and how working in different settings influences your use of colour, light, and texture?

 Freya - I’m definitely happiest when I’m drawing / making outside. Sadly my studio doesn’t have amazing lighting so I’m often running my paintings out onto the street to check my work. Light has a huge impact on my ability to focus on my work and enjoy making, so when the weather permits I’m out on that side street! 

 Your art often reflects a sense of solitude and introspection. How do you think this sense of personal space and contemplation resonates with the broader themes of Under the Laurels?

Freya - I am so excited to be included in an exhibition which is exploring the Bloomsbury group. I take inspiration from their decorative approaches & freedom to making, politics and life. A major influence of mine is Vanessa Bell, particularly her use of colour.

How do you approach your palette?

 Freya - Colour is possibly the most important part of my practice. I became fascinated by colour theory and the science behind colour being a learned experience whilst studying. I try to be true to my memory with how I portray light and colour, this is why i think my palette is often soft with injections of bold blues, pinks and reds. These childhood colour associations seeping through.

Freya’s studio in Brighton, Sussex.

You work across multiple surfaces—from paper to board to canvas—with what feels like an experimental confidence. How does the choice of medium impact the way you approach each piece or idea?

 Freya - The way I approach my painting came from when I was studying Illustration and I discovered soft pastels. I fell in love with how I could blend and blur & blend colours and shapes. Although I love experimenting with different textiles practices I do feel very content with a lightly primed canvas. Im always pleased by how the canvas soaks up the oil a little and I can work in endless thin dreamlike layers. 

 There’s a strong sense of layering and process in your work, often revealing past versions of an image through faint marks or uncovered lines. Could you describe what draws you to this recursive, storytelling approach?

 Freya - I work from memory a lot of the time or at the least from drawings which are often remembered so I am glad that these works come across like this. They are me processing my memory of that place and time. 

Your work often contrasts soft, imagery with the vastness of landscapes. How do you balance these playful, day-to-day inspirations with the more profound themes in your work?

 Freya - My memories of Cornwall scattered over the last 20 something years have become a feature in most of my work. Even when I’m not painting or drawing them directly. I think simply the process and rhythm I got into when I first started working this way has had a huge impact on my practice. Complex familial relationships, personal development and set backs a defiantly play a role in my paintings but I don’t tend to think about these too much. More how the colour I remember at the time made me feel - which in turn I suppose reflects my wider feelings towards my environment.

 Your pieces seem to capture the life cycle of an idea, evolving through layers of color and line over time. Could you elaborate on how time and the evolution of thought play a role in the creation and completion of each piece? 

 Freya - I think this really comes back to working from memory and mentally unlocking the layers of my memories and the different iterations of them.  

Scott McCracken

Scott McCracken Photographed by Benjamin Deakin

You’ve mentioned in the past that placing restrictions on your practice, like avoiding the depiction of people or objects, has helped you create more authentic work. Have these restrictions evolved over time?

Scott - When I said authentic, I maybe should have said unforced.  I thought I was trying to find a way of making paintings that I could sustain over a longer period but, with hindsight, I think that was a way of buying myself time.  There’s so much freedom and liberation already in making a painting, it’s helpful to place some kind of limitation on yourself and the work.  But after a while, a restriction can become a convention or a trope or a formula, so they need to evolve.  These initial restrictions have changed organically over time, I’m almost not conscious of it.  For a while, the shapes and the spaces within the paintings had to remain flat, but then they started to inflate, so a circle became a sphere and so forth.  This allowed the pictorial space to open up much more; it’s continuing to expand now despite the paintings remaining on a smaller scale and the motifs flattening out again.  For several years, I exclusively worked on the one format and orientation of support.  I needed that continuity.  But then I lost interest in that modularity and wanted a new manoeuvrability, even if that meant reducing the canvas size.  At present, I’m far more receptive to allowing nameable, or almost-nameable motifs, into the paintings in a way that I would have vehemently rejected before. 

 Your process involves having multiple paintings in progress simultaneously, I believe it’s often up to 15 or sometimes even 20.  How does this approach affect the development of your ideas, and do your feel it allows for or encourages any unexpected connections between pieces?

 Scott - I move the paintings around a lot, move them between being upright and lying flat on a table.  Elements can find themselves migrating from one painting to another.  Working on a small scale has allowed me the opportunity to be able to not only work on multiple paintings at a time, but to quickly move between them and to look at them simultaneously.  Simultaneous and comparative looking is important for me in the studio.  I occasionally bring out older works and put them up as well.  So surprising connections are often discovered not only between current paintings but older ones too.  Often, it’s other artist friends who visit the studio who make these connections rather than myself, as I can be too close to what I’m doing.  It often feels like my paintings have their own ideas and I’m just trying to keep up with them.   People tend to think that by working on so many small pictures, it must mean that one can be less precious than working on bigger canvases.  But it’s not really about ‘preciousness’, it’s about giving each painting a certain level of care and attention.  I’d like to think I give my paintings that. 

 Can you talk about how you recognise when a painting has reached the point where it stands alone and is that the same as it being finished?

 Scott - I find it’s healthier for the paintings not to be thought of as existing as either finished or unfinished.  It becomes too binary, as if the painting is either switched on or switched off.  I find that a painting can exist in and as different states of being.  It’s more about finding the core, or the essence of it, and that’s when it becomes active.  Animated.  That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s finished but it’s found itself.  Or, more accurately, it’s found one version of itself where it can exist in the world independent of me.  I never know what a painting is going to do until it’s been made.  Lately, I’ve been thinking about how making a painting is the act of searching for something.  There is some sense of where you may end up, but only very generally.  In making a painting, you’re searching for the specific in the general.

 Do you find that working within certain limitations—such as size, form, or colour palette has been a driving force in your work?

 Scott - I certainly needed those restrictions around 10 years ago.  And because of those limitations, I’m making the paintings I am now.  Those restrictions are still deeply felt in the work, even if they can’t be so easily located.  It’s definitely been a trajectory, although not necessarily a linear one.  For a while, inhibiting the paintings was helpful as it meant I could focus on fewer elements and try to find out what sort of work I should be making.  At the moment, I’m feeding them more with what I allow myself to put into them, there’s now a lot more to draw upon.  There still aren’t narratives as such, but there could be implied scenarios in some of them.  I intermittently flirt with the idea of making bigger paintings, but I don’t think the work as it exists now necessarily wants translated onto a larger scale.  Colour has always been tricky for me.  The fewer colours I use in a painting, the more important those colours have to become and the more they have to do.  I want each painting to feel as if its colour is somehow natural to it rather than having been simply deposited there.   

You’ve spoken about your fascination with artists like Giorgio Morandi, Pierre Bonnard and Prunella Clough. How have these influences informed your painting?

Scott - Ernst Wilhelm Nay said “paintings come from paintings, the work of the painter exists within this continuum.”  That sentiment resonates with my own experience, as painting comes as much from painting as it comes from life, probably even more so.  With Morandi, he’s endlessly fascinating despite his insistence and reliance on such modest objects to paint from.  There is a silence embedded within his pictures.  And his edges between forms are both assured and hesitant.  With Prunella Clough, it’s her attitude as an artist but also how that attitude was reflected within and through the work she made.  Something was being broken down and remade anew. 

Many of my paintings only appear after being overworked and undone.  It takes time for that to happen and can’t be hurried along.  Looking at a Bonnard painting is a complete experience where you don’t really want to stop looking at it.  To go back to my earlier point, his colour always feels natural and never forced.  Even the earlier atypical darker denser paintings from the 1890s I get a lot from.  But there are so many artists whose work I look at for lots of different reasons, particularly paintings that have been around for a while and had time to settle, so from around the late 19th century through to the second half of the 20th century.  Artists like Francis Picabia, Arthur Dove, Betty Parsons, Serge Charchoune, Lee Lozano, Bruno Goller, Rene Daniels.

 Your practice seems to involve a lot of spontaneity, especially in the way you reconfigure motifs. How do you strike a balance between planned structure and improvisation in your paintings?

 Spontaneity and improvisation can be quite fundamental components, but there has to be something else that the painting is reaching for.  It can’t just be moments of spontaneity, the spontaneity needs to attach itself to something that is more fixed, even if it’s ambiguous.  That’s one of the fantastic things about painting, it can contain different and opposing principles or forces.  It thrives of them.  Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about what is being pictured in my work.  Picture-making is important.  For a long time, I was referred to as an abstract painter making abstract paintings.  I can understand why but I never thought of myself, or the work, as being ‘abstract’.  I was making paintings, and they looked the way they did almost by happenstance rather than coming from any kind of critical position.  But then I started to become much more interested in still life and landscape painting.  To be clear, I was interested in landscape painting rather than landscape.  So, I began to occupy a terrain within painting that I could navigate and part of that was the notion of picturing something.  My earlier paintings were highly structured, possibly even over-structured.  The work has travelled from structure towards an amorphousness despite there now being specific motifs that can be identified and named.  I’ve found there’s more of capacity for improvisation in the nameable than in the unnameable. 

Photography by Benjamin Deakin

How does your studio environment affect your creative process, would you change anything if you could?

 Scott - I’m very fortunate with the studio I have right now.  A few months ago, I finally got myself a studio sofa and that’s meant I’ve spent more time sitting down than I would have done before.  It sounds quite trivial but a consequence of that is I probably paint less but look a lot more.   Having said that, it’s also difficult not to imagine a potential future studio and what that could be like.  I’m probably not alone in saying I’ve thought about a larger studio with more natural light and better storage.  But the studio I’m in right now is the best studio I’ve had, and I think that has had a positive impact on the work.  The environment affects the routine and the routine affects the making-process.  I occasionally go to the studio and don’t do any painting, I just like being there, being in what I consider to be the paintings’ natural habitat.  I’ve been reading more in the studio too, so all of this changes the incubation of the paintings. 

What are you reading at the moment?

 Lately I’ve been re-reading Clement Greenberg’s ‘Homemade Aesthetics’ and Italo Calvino’s ‘Cosmicomics’.  I’m also taking my time working through ‘Talking Painting’ edited by David Ryan.  I’ve discovered that reading is good way of moving from the outside world to the inside of the painting so that’s been the first thing I tend to do in the morning when I get to the studio.  My preference is to read what other artists write about art rather than theorists and historians, especially as I sometimes write about painting myself. 

You are one of the Programme Leaders and a mentor at Turps Art School, and a regular contributor of Turps Magazine, I am yet to meet an artist with a bad word to say about the programme! - what makes it so special?

Scott - That’s very good to know!  One of the many things that makes Turps so singular is that all the mentors who teach are working painters –  everyone involved spends their time thinking about and making paintings.   I often say that Turps focuses on what happens inside the studio and not outside of it.  It’s about making the bad work along with the good work at Turps, to accept and embrace it as a vital necessity rather than trying to overcome, evade or negate it. 

The important thing is the work itself.  It always comes first. 

Laura Wormell

Laura Wormell photographed by Julian Hawkins

Many of your works, like Threshold and Hot Gas Hellcat, seem to merge surreal and introspective elements. What draws you to these themes, and how do they reflect your perspective on intimacy and vulnerability?

 Laura - I know I respond most to works that reveal vulnerability, whether that be intentional or not.  Perhaps it’s a misplaced mothering instinct, my empathy kicks in.  I went to see a concert last night of Max Richter’s Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Reworked.  It’s a towering piece of music, it has all the virtuoso themes from the original but pulled apart and reordered. 

Aside from my own reaction to the music - a piece that manages to be both so recognisable it almost becomes quotidian and yet deeply profound - I found myself imagining the joy and the sorrow of performing this to an audience.  No matter how masterful the musicians are, you can see the effort and the concentration, the wordless communication between the ensemble, the bow hairs breaking during the violent passages, the joke between the cellists when they turn the page too soon, the pride across the face of the solo violinist upon completing a consummate passage in the shiniest patent leather shoes.  The performance is an attempt to be perfect and yet it is immeasurably more moving by the nature of it being live with the character and nuance of the performers and the moment in time.

Your paintings often feature subtle, emotive colour palettes and intriguing figurative compositions. Could you share a bit about your approach to colour and form and how you see these elements contributing to the atmosphere of your pieces?

 Laura - I learnt to play instruments as a child and music has continued to be a very important part of my life.  Like making music, colour is sometimes intuitive and emotional, sometimes more technically informed.  The instinct is very closely related - there might be a quote or sample of colour that I want to incorporate in a more conscious way - like using a particular sound in a composition from somewhere else, whereas sometimes the choices are more irrational and emotional in the same way as having a fondness for the key of D flat major.  Leading on from this, I approach form and composition in a similar way - I very rarely work on multiple paintings at once - unless there is some serious drying time to be got around.  Each painting has its time and its tempo which is unavoidably bound up in my own preferences for that period.

Laura Wormell - Untitled 2

Monotype on card

24 x 19 cm

 Your art often invites the viewer into a personal, almost dreamlike world. How do you find the balance between personal storytelling and creating open interpretations for your audience?

 Laura - I read an interview with the writer Alberto Manguel in which he describes the reader as the real author of a text.  The writer indeed writes, but the words “remain in a sort of limbo… until whatever has been written is transformed by the eye of the reader into whatever the reader sees in it”.  Anyone who makes anything - painting, music, dance, poetry - is desperate to communicate something.  But there is always a failure to be able to, by the tools we have available, which creates a gap between the maker and the viewer.  This miscommunication or approximate translation is where the most interesting stuff is.  It means a work can have life again once it is completed and leaves the studio.  

 To use another reading analogy, I have read Jane Eyre at multiple times in my life since my first encounter with it when I was about 14.  It’s a very different book for me now.  Painting is the same, the act of making the work and the thoughts that drove me to do it are completed once it leaves the studio.  My own relation to the object I made is also transformed - opened by the passing of time.

With your background in both formal art education and the immersive Turps Studio Programme, how have these experiences influenced your work and development as an artist?

 Laura- The Slade was an incredible place to be, I met life long friends there who continue to be important influences in both life and art.  However, I was very young (like most) when I went to the Slade - and so inexperienced.  I hadn’t learnt how to study properly on my own yet, and was painfully lacking in confidence to ask the right questions.  Turps felt like a second chance to really engage in my work and learn about my place in my own painting. I had spent a decade after graduating from my BA deepening my inquiry into painting so was in a great position to broaden my knowledge without fearing a loss of moorings. 

Laura Womell - Untitled 4

Monotype on card

24 x 19 cm

 I was very drawn to your exhibition I Am Your Creature at Asylum Studio over the summer.  The intricate fonts and human figures that morph into letters create a fascinating dialogue between body and symbol. Could you share your thoughts on what inspired this exploration of text as an abstract element within the figurative realm, and how you feel the interplay between these forms impacts the viewer’s experience of both the image and its meaning?

Laura -  Text had been lingering around in my work for a few years before I began making the work for I Am Your Creature.  I had been struggling to truly turn letters into shapes - the words always felt like a didactic message which would exert influence over the figurative aspects of the painting they were on - there is the clue, my use of ‘on’ shows that they felt like a separate entity to the rest of the ‘image’.  I really wanted to find a way to make the letters part of the image and vice versa.  I had been researching alphabets for sometime and came across a 16th century human alphabet from Bologna that I couldn’t get out of my mind.  I started to adapt the figures to suit my needs and so the work began to take shape.

Through the convergence of symbols and imagery, I wanted to see how these fundamental elements of human communication intertwine and influence perception and raise questions about how meaning is constructed and conveyed.  

I’m fascinated by the idea that letters, as basic units of language, carry both abstract and concrete meanings, influenced by their form and the context in which they are presented.  Simultaneously I’m interested in the role of imagery in communication, and the interplay between the seen and the read.

There was a visitor to the show at Asylum Studios that was very cross that he couldn’t make out what the paintings ‘said’.  They were even more incensed that the titles didn’t necessarily illuminate any further.  I tried to explain that they weren’t signs or information boards but rather paintings to be looked at, and ‘meaning’ was to be gained this way.  In the end, I gave in and read the quotes to the visitor as we walked around the gallery.  I don’t think once I had revealed the words it made any difference, they were still just as cross!  I’m fascinated by this demand we have of imagery and symbols to generate meaning - when really we as the viewer hold the key.

In Conversation Live -Modern Mud, Chaired by Timothy Hyman RA

To accompany our exhibition Modern Mud at Colonnade House, Worthing, we were delighted to present a sold-out live edition of In Conversation featuring exhibiting artists Leigh Curtis, Benjamin Prosser, and Ben Westley Clarke, chaired by the distinguished artist and writer, the late Timothy Hyman RA.

Timothy Hyman, who sadly passed away recently, was a visionary painter, writer, and art historian whose contributions to the art world were profound and far-reaching. Known for his richly narrative paintings and his championing of figurative art, Hyman's work was suffused with humanity, imagination, and a deep understanding of art's potential to connect us to each other and to the world around us. His critical writings, including influential studies on Stanley Spencer, Pierre Bonnard, and Indian art, reflected his intellectual rigor and his passion for the undercurrents of modern and contemporary creativity.

Together, the panelists represented a vibrant cross-section of contemporary painting, each contributing distinct voices to the dialogue around materiality, narrative, and the enduring relevance of figuration in modern art. Chaired by Timothy Hyman, the In Conversation event was not only an illuminating exploration of these artists' practices but also a fitting tribute to Hyman's lifelong dedication to celebrating the richness and diversity of the art world. His presence and insights will be deeply missed, but his legacy continues to inspire.

Cheri Smith

Cheri in her London Studio

Your work frequently explores themes of animality and wildness. How do these ideas manifest in the pieces you are presenting for Under the Laurels?

Cheri - I think that my deep underlying interest in that which is alive, animal and elemental is what unites the pieces I am presenting. There is a particular sense of touch and sensitivity to texture, whether working in pencil or egg tempera. I think this is perhaps most keenly felt in the portraits of my dog, in which drawing her from close observation came almost to feel like the act of stroking her fur.

You use a range of materials like oil, egg tempera, and glue distemper in your paintings. What influenced your choice of medium for the works featured in this exhibition, and how do different materials shape your artistic process?

Cheri - I enjoy the process of making paint from pigment and binders such as oil, egg or glue. It emphasises the material nature of pigments, which are really just crushed pieces of the natural world - such as rocks, plants, shells and beetles. This understanding of paint as being something formed of and from the earth certainly shapes the paintings themselves. Many of my pieces included in Under the Laurels are drawings made in pencil on paper - to me this feels similarly earthly and material - the most immediate, sensitive medium there is.

Cheri Smith - Toy Landscape

Your paintings often depict animals with a blend of playfulness and violence. What is the symbolic role of these animals in your work?

Cheri - Animals can have an endless stream of different meanings and associations, which change from one person to the next. They defy any attempt to easily pin them down, and I am interested in that ambiguity and ambivalence.

You’ve spoken about the ‘unknowability’ of the natural world, could you talk a bit more on this aspect of nature?

Cheri - My practice is deeply rooted in the natural world, driven by a curiosity to encounter it and continued attempts to understand it. I am often returning to Thomas Nagel’s essay What is it like to be a bat?, which vividly explores the impossibility of comprehending the experience of a lifeform so different to our own. Of course, I still continue to try.

Your work seems to grapple with the tension between human understanding of nature and the autonomy of the animal world. How has this theme evolved over time?

Cheri - This is something I am always aware of and thinking about. I worked as a visitor assistant at the Natural History Museum for many years, and came to feel that all this collecting, classifying and displaying probably reveals more about humans than it does about nature. It’s like our knowledge is something imposed over the top rather than feeling intrinsic or innate. At the same time, I find the history of how we have looked at and attempted to understand the natural world deeply compelling, providing a bottomless well of inspiration. Ultimately I try to afford everything the same level of care and scrutiny in my paintings, whether stone, plant, animal or human. All kinds of beings are often muddled up together, forgetful of any supposed categorisations or hierarchies.

Cheri Smith, Fig 5 

You’ve had residencies in diverse locations like Jamaica and Italy. How have these experiences of being immersed in different environments influenced your work?

Cheri - I feel incredibly fortunate to have undertaken residencies in such places; their influence will last a lifetime. In Jamaica I found myself struck by the sense of deep time embedded in the landscape - I snorkelled over coral reefs brimming with life, then walked over ancient fossil coral embedded in the earth. I learned from locals how much the coral reefs have visibly diminished in their lifetime. In volterra, Italy I felt a deep affinity for the landscapes and wildlife. It was magical to be visited by hares and deer while painting trees, rocks and rivers. I definitely found that the relationship between observation and imagination in my work strengthened during this time.

With animals playing such a central role in your work, what kind of research or observation do you conduct to inform the animal behaviours and interactions in your paintings?

Cheri - I am always seeking nature out, and spending time looking closely. I lift up stones to find out what’s underneath. I hang bird feeders in my windows and sit quietly drawing the birds that visit. I bring small treasures back to my studio which inform my paintings - bits of fungus, bark, feathers, dead bugs, hatched eggshells and empty snailshells. I draw my dog, and my plants, and the people I love. In this sense my research is deeply personal, always rooted in my own direct encounters and observations.

Are there particular books or paintings you return to?

Cheri - I reread Surfacing by Margaret Atwood every few years, when I feel a tugging at me to follow its nameless protagonist into wildness and madness. I adore everything I have read by Joy Williams, and I hold her strange, spiralling worlds always close to my own as I work. Living in London, I am lucky to have access to some of my favourite paintings - I visit Pisanello, Sassetta and Giovanni di Paolo in the National Gallery as though catching up with old friends.

Like Dora Carrington, there is a rich and idiosyncratic world within your work, are there themes or landscapes you plan to approach in the future?

Cheri - With each body of work I make in the studio, new veins of thought open up, and I find myself readying to make the next more ambitious in terms of depth and complexity. The landscapes I have been working with recently have become increasingly psychological and some themes bubbling to the surface of my thoughts include entanglement, isolation and survival.

Stuart Rayner

Stuart Rayner in his Studio, Margate.

Your work often brings natural forms into cubist, contemplative interior spaces. How does this blend of nature and domesticity reflect your personal experiences or identity, and how is this theme explored in your contributions to Under the Laurels?

Stuart - I think the blending of nature and domesticity in my work comes from my interest in romanticising them through painting and illustration. My works resemble my appreciation for nature, and how, in my spare time away from the studio, I am usually at home drawing surrounded by my house plants, or traveling to the nearest green space I can find. Bringing natural forms into my living space brings me comfort, and recreating those places and objects in my work is an expression of that. I am often reflecting on my lived experiences and memories, which patch together to form a sense of self alongside exploring the human relationship to nature rather than just nature itself.

You subvert traditional art historical themes, particularly with your portrayal of the female nude and classical still-life compositions. How do you see this approach challenging or reshaping these genres, especially through the lens of queer identity?

Stuart - I have always felt the need to paint subjects which I can identify with, and create a sense of familiarity as personal reflection. Although I have always felt inspired by classical subjects, I have rarely identified with a lot of them. Queer subjects are historically less visible in traditional paintings of nudes and still life works. Reshaping these subjects from a queer perspective is my way of countering conventional expectations about heteronormativity. It’s very much a personal journey that has come naturally, but I hope that it’s something that other queer people can relate too.

Stuart Rayner, Evening Repotting, Oil on Canvas

Your paintings are known for their emotional tenderness and connection to nature. What role does nature play in your work, and how does this relationship manifest in your pieces for Under the Laurels?

Stuart -I think my fondness of nature comes from having periods of suspended time and stillness. There’s a lot of emotions that can come to the surface when you have time to look inwards whilst being part of the landscape you are in. I find painting landscapes captures that experience. When I painted ‘golden hour’ I was responding to the inherent feeling of nostalgia that is felt collectively during Autumn, in this way it was a manifestation of connection and experience.

Interior spaces feature prominently in your work. What draws you to this setting, and how do you use it to convey a sense of quietness or introspection in your paintings?

Stuart - The interior spaces that I paint are mainly my home or studio. I think I’m drawn to them because  they are places that are comfortable and lived in — they are an invitation to look at the scattered belongings that leave hints about the people inhabiting that space. In that way, my approach to painting still life works is really influenced by people and their domestic spaces. Open sketchbooks, flowers bought for an occasion, objects only recently set down. I’m most interested in signs of life. The compositions I create usually hold an enhanced sense of calmness and contemplation as a reflection of the moments where I pause and place value onto my surroundings.

Colour plays a significant role in your practice, with vibrant tones often used to express emotional states. How do you decide on your colour palette for a piece? Stuart - The colours in my works are heavily influenced by time of day and seasonal changes, the qualities of these atmospheres guide my use of colours as well as my emotional responses. At the moment I’m using a lot of raw umber tones, I’ve been experimenting with this as it adds a warmer glow to things that may not naturally have that attribute, i feel as though enhancing the warmth of a painting can make it seem more intimate yet open. 

Queer identity and contemporary living are central themes in your work. How do these themes intersect with more traditional elements like the still life or female nude, and what conversations are you hoping to start through this juxtaposition?

Stuart - I don’t feel as though I am creating a juxtaposition, but rather filtering traditional elements through a lens from my perspective. Painting from my perspective gives an insight to my identity. I use traditional methods to inform the compositions of my works because still life or nude portraiture can give quite everyday moments a sense of significance. I think romanticising the things that I find typically normal is an important part of my practice which comes from a place of appreciation.

 Margate, where you are based, has a growing reputation as a creative hub. Does the local environment and its art scene influence your practice?

Stuart - The local art scene can be useful at times to reach out to other creatives and share experiences and advice. As someone who works in a shared studio building I find that it helps to be in a Creative environment to stay motivated and positive, and I enjoy having frequent access to exhibitions and creative culture. It doesn’t influence my practice directly but it’s becoming a good location for mutual artists and creatives.

Stuart Rayner - Apartment garden

Can you tell us about your workspace?

Stuart - I am currently renting a workspace at Joseph Wales studios with close friends and artists where I paint as often as I can. I find It's a good working environment as it's a very active space where we share mutual interests and ideas. It's an old building with a lot of windows which means my practice is definitely effected by natural light, but I enjoy how that can interact with my pace of working. My workspace is full of all my works in progress. I would say I have two main areas in my studio, one being my table which I use for making works on paper and playing with compositions whilst I’m in between paintings, and the wall spaces which I use to hang canvases and paint. I always work on multiple paintings at once so that I can go from one to another when I hit a wall or get unmotivated towards a certain painting. I find it helpful to have a collection of objects and visual references around my studio,  at the moment I have a lot of flowers, magazines and drawings from daily life around to inspire me.

Your interior spaces often feel like places of care and contemplation. How do you think your work invites us to engage with these intimate settings, and what emotions or thoughts do you hope that we take away from the experience?

Stuart - I am glad you say they feel like places of care and contemplation because that’s exactly what I want the viewer to feel! I think painting from personal experience is an invitation to engage with moments that have stuck with me and to potentially relate with them.

In both your painting and illustration, you explore themes of contemporary life as a queer person. How do you see your work contributing to the broader conversation about queer visibility and representation in contemporary art, particularly in a group exhibition like Under the Laurels?

As a gay person I find these themes naturally leak into my work because I make from a place of vulnerability and emotional honesty. Of course my work is gay, being gay is joyful, and a lot of the most beautiful parts of my life are to do with my time in nature or my partner or my queer friends. Being open and showing my work is my way of contributing to these conversations, I am happy to be here as an artist, and share a space with other great artists.

Greg Becker

Photograph by: Julie Tsimara Mellis

Your work often carries a sense of nostalgia particularly through references to past eras, could you speak a bit about this?

Greg- Going right back to my very early work there was always desire to make a connection with the art of the past and even five decades later I still have a slight aversion to making contemporary references. I don’t ever seem to draw cars or computers and recently I painted an old thatched barn and thought that was embarrassing because it was a corny, olde worlde subject but I tried to paint it as a ghost barn which was sort of materialising or maybe disappearing. Generally though my nostalgia obsession is a bit of a mystery, its maybe partly an escape, the way we all want, at times to escape. Painting itself is a way of stepping apart from mainstream society, escaping from the mundane and this, I think links in directly with my attraction to nostalgia. Past Eras are fixed and only change through the way we imagine them.     

How do personal experiences or intimate environments shape your work?

Greg - Part of why I like working from drawings I make on location is that they are a direct link with the personal experience of being at a certain place at a certain time in a way that a photograph isn’t. Its like you are absorbing or taking possession of something by standing perhaps for an uncomfortably long time studying a particular place. And in the act of this objective study, paradoxically, through the drawing your soul is somehow embedded in the record of that time. 

Greg Becker, Paysage, Oil monotype on paper

You’ve spoken about your love for historical imagery, is there a specific period that particularly resonates with you and how do these references inform your approach?

Greg - As an illustrator I relished making reference to the Victorian & Edwardian Era’s and this followed through to my early paintings which often involved Edwardian Ladies & Gentlemen lost in topiary mazes or Napoleonic Soldiers parading through hay fields. They were stage sets with a slightly whimsical feel but I was also trying to evoke a timeless reflective mood, something I still try to do only without the need for overt historic references.   

How do you merge the sense of mystery and longing for a forgotten era with the more concrete, everyday experiences that you incorporate into your work? Does one influence the other more deeply?

Greg - While I’m out walking, although I’m not conscious of it, I’m always looking for something. An image, a scene or place that suggests a narrative. It can be as simple as a field  high on a hill with unusual markings that somehow evoke the idea of something mysterious. So, perhaps this searching and selectiveness helps the process of creating an image that reflects my interests and preoccupations.   

In previous interviews, you've mentioned the importance of spontaneity in your process. How do you balance detailed, deliberate work with that more immediate, impulsive?

Greg - My relationship with spontaneity is very much that of compromise. Ideally I would like not to rely on any previous realisation of a composition and for the composition to completely evolve and in my mind this something I’m always working towards. But in reality I nearly always base my studio paintings on the composition of location drawings. However, the way I translate these drawings into a painting usually involves many changes and nothing pleases me more than to have a ghostly remnant of these previous workings still evident in the finished piece, perhaps as a homage to the ideal of spontaneity.    

Greg Becker, Divided Field, Layered monotype on paper

With your background in both painting and illustration, does one inform the other and how do you navigate the shift between these mediums?

Greg - Although now, I’m completely happy as a full time painter, I do feel grateful for the experiences and things I learnt as a practising illustrator. It was certainly worth giving up the some of the many expressive freedoms of an artist to avoid the necessity of having to get a ‘proper job’. Although being an illustrator did feel like a job, because it involved giving price quotes, working to deadlines, working with agents and clients and having your work judged by the public, but these also continue to be part of my life as an artist, so in many ways the two rolls are very similar.

What are you reading at the moment?

Greg - That’s a very nice question. At the moment I’m halfway through ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ by Oscar Wilde. It is utterly brilliant, beautiful, repulsive and fascinating in equal measure. After having read quite a few (very good) books that don’t have any obvious connection to my work its nice hit on something that has some links, namely, painting - the pursuit of beauty, being delusional, not wanting things to change and hence idealising the past. The book is of course many other things and the themes of guilt and denial seem to get stronger the more I read. Themes which tragically became such a part of Wilde’s personal life.   

You live between London and Sussex can talk about the work you have made in Sussex specifically?

Greg - Having a caravan in West Sussex not only changed my work, it changed my life, giving me easy access to the south downs and making life in London infinitely more bearable. The Downland between Arundel and Worthing I find particularly inspiring. Its a  landscape that hides many secret joys within its soft folded valleys. And although I’ve never been keen on depicting stunningly beautiful picturesque views, the downs somehow make me forget myself. I’m completely drawn in by their unusual mixture of the grandeur and intimacy. About 3 years ago, after 4 decades as a purely studio artist, I started seriously drawing and painting pleinair and found to my surprise I really liked it. A big part of the attraction of this was enjoying the peace and solitude of the downs and how that chimed with my need to create images with a contemplative, reflective atmosphere.   

What element of the Sussex countryside do you find most intriguing or find yourself coming back to time and again?

Greg - What I find most intriguing about the downs are the valley’s that are quite deep but still fairly narrow, giving a closeness to details on the far side. This almost plan view angle seems to create another landscape above the normal horizon line, replacing the clouds with more fields and doubling the narrative possibilities. 

Robyn Packham

Robyn Packham in her Studio

Under the Laurels is a group exhibition that brings together a diverse group of artists. How does your work connect to or contrast with the themes of the exhibition, and what does being part of this show mean to you?

Robyn - I am thrilled to be part of this exhibition as I have a great deal of admiration for the other exhibiting artists and when researching Dora Carrington, I found she was born in Herefordshire where my family moved in 2011. It’s funny how such a small detail can make you feel much more connected to an artist and their work. There is an honesty to Dora Carrington’s artwork that I strive for in my own painting, while themes of intimacy and female identity also resonate with my work.

Your practice often explores human interaction and the natural world. Could you share how these themes have come to be so significant?

 Robyn - I am interested in fleeting moments in time and how these interactions mirror the transience of the natural world. These themes stem from my upbringing in the countryside, reading folk tales as well as my fascination with archaeology and how clues of past human life are hidden in the landscape waiting to be discovered, or that are forever absorbed into the earth.

 You describe your paintings as “windows into an acutely ephemeral world” with the female figure as a “strong and defiant presence.” Can you tell us how these concepts evolved?

 Robyn - After I graduated from my BA in 2020 I effectively became my Mum’s companion / carer as she had terminal cancer and was only given a year to live back in 2014. She in fact lived for a defiant 8 years. She was a talented painter and inspired me to want to become an artist when I was a child, before I really understood what one was. A few years later when I started studying art, the school curriculums would focus on male artists, so it has taken some time to wrap my head around what it is to be a working female artist. My Mum’s resilience and strength runs through my work and keeps me working hard at figuring it out. From this background the themes of ephemerality and the strong female figure has emerged.

Robyn Packham, Acceptance, Oil on canvas.

Memory and grief are also central themes in your work. How do you translate such personal and emotional experiences into visual narratives?

Robyn -Death, grief and memory are emotional themes, but they’re also universal things we all have in common at some stage. It is part of the human condition and part of life, and I strive for my artwork to be full of life. This can be through use of colour, but also through depictions of familiar or relatable scenery and objects. Similarly, I think Dora Carrington’s work is full of these intimate moments of life and its fluidity.

 Your work seems to traverse the boundary between the physical world and what lies beyond it, would you say there is a spiritual element to your work?

Robyn - There is a nod to something bigger, along the lines of a spiritual element in my work. Invisible connections, grief, symbolism, female bonds and the moments between moments; memories and repetitions; the self – all non-physical things that I consider.

Robyn Packham in her studio

 Can you tell us about memories of growing up in rural Herefordshire and any influences you feel have stayed with you?

 Robyn - The tranquillity of home definitely finds its way into my work and scenes often appear peaceful and dreamlike. Herefordshire is an ancient, picturesque landscape and has many iron age hillforts dotted around it which we would often walk to, while the Golden Valley is the home to prehistoric burial chambers hailing it as a once sacred place. Arthur’s Stone is one such monument and my Mum and I would go on drives to it as we sang along to Aha’s ‘Take on Me’ loudly in the car. Arthur’s Stone gets its name from a legend of King Arthur killing a giant upon the stone, leaving the impression of his elbows on one of the stones as he fell. We would sit and draw it and simply enjoy the incredible view up there. Mum wanted her ashes to be left nearby, so to this day it remains a sacred place.

 What are you reading at the moment?

 Robyn - I’m currently going between Hettie Judah’s latest book ‘Acts of Creation – On Art and Motherhood’ and ‘The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World’ by Jennifer Higgie. ‘Oh To Be a Painter’ is a little collection of essays by Virginia Wolf that I’m also dipping into.

Robyn Packham, Deadheading, Charcoal on Paper.

 Your practice incorporates a mix of drawing, acrylic, and oil painting. Can you talk about your creative process from the initial gathering of sketches and memories to the final piece?

 Robyn - Drawing is integral to my artwork as it allows me to think through ideas visually. I keep sketchbooks where I draw from life and my surroundings and these observations trickle into my painting. I used to draw something from life and then paint it. While there is nothing wrong with that, I now feel that the intuitive qualities of making drawings from life is something that can’t be replicated through painting, or perhaps it simply doesn’t need to be replicated. Increasingly I draw from memory and my imagination when putting ideas together for a painting. I love watching films and enjoy piecing together drawn imagery to form my own scenes of layered charcoal, acrylic and oil paint.

 Looking ahead, how do you see your exploration of themes like identity, womanhood, and the human condition evolving? What future directions do you envision for your work, both in terms of subject matter and technique?

 Robyn - Hair as a symbol of identity and mother/ daughter relationships continues to feature in my work. This has led me to think more about clothing and textiles as a prop for identity, and how pattern can denote specific places and stories. Much of my work references the outside world but depicts personal interior spaces, so it will be interesting to see how this may unravel.

Do you have a favourite work by Dora Carrington and if so, what draws you to it?

Robyn - I love her intimate portraits as you can get a real sense of the relationships she had with her sitters. In particular her portrait of Lytton Strachey reading.  

David Surman

David Surman Photography by Rosalind Shahnavaz 2021

David Surman joins Weald Director Holly In Conversation delving into the complexities and contradictions at the heart of his artistic process. Exploring the often overlooked yet profound truths he draws upon, including the more vulnerable aspects of life that inspire his work. Surman reflects on his fascination with natural subjects and the inherent tension that emerges in his creative practice, a tension he believes is essential to his art. David's works have been showcased around the world, including exhibitions in Hong Kong, New York, Amsterdam and London. We caught up with him in the lead up to his current exhibition with us in Brighton…..

David - would you start please by introducing yourself and tell us a little

bit about yourself and your work.  

David - My name is David Surman, I’m an artist based in South East London right now. I live

there with my partner the artist Ian Gouldstone on the 22nd floor of an apartment

building overlooking the Thames. I work primarily in painting and drawing, though I

also make prints and sculptures from time to time.

I named the duo exhibition you are currently part of ‘Life’ as life is a key

theme in both yours and Joseph Dilnot’s work – a sense of energy,

vitality and connection to animals seems abundant – where does this

originate?

David - Every day we wake up with a certain amount of energy, and this changes depending

on our age, but each day we spend that precious allowance on things. As an artist

we spend it on making work, and somewhat resent having to spend it elsewhere. I

think this is because an artist gains insights into mortality through daily self

expression and this makes them mindful of wasted time. Animals never waste time,

they do everything for the perfect amount of time.

David Surman - After the Hunt Unicorn Steps out

You have shown your work internationally on several occasions, can

you tell me about some of your experiences?

David - I don’t really like to travel, I don’t like airports and the whole process of getting from

country to country. But taking my work to a new place with a new audience makes

travelling worthwhile, because people are most beautiful when you see them in their

own area, comfortable and settled. I arrive as the strange thing and they get to see

that, but then I get to see them happy and un-self-conscious. Which is a sensibility I

am interested in as an artist.

You have spoken before of your interest in human experience and our

impact on the natural world. Can you expand on this?

David - My home village was a very small place in a valley on the North Devon coast. Just

as I was hitting my teenage years we moved to the West Highlands of Scotland.

Nature was all around. In my lifetime I have seen it disappear, both through the

media and with my own eyes. A kind of silence is descending on the world as insects

and birds disappear. To me this is a very painful thing to contemplate and so I try to

make work that says ‘look at animals!’ because they are going away. Humans have

become alienated from the world by industrialisation, and we are in a post-industrial

phase now where we need to renew our connection with nature. I see my work as

part of that.

David Surman - Hungry Dog

In my recent studio visit, you showed me a series of works on paper

which serve as an ongoing investigation into your chosen subject or

animal, is there a particular subject that you find yourself returning to?

David - I don’t really know why I repeatedly paint certain animals, other than that I know

them very well and feel a connection to them. I often paint domesticated animals

because they are human-like and are a mirror for us. But really I want to live in a

world where nature is elevated and revered and not seen as disposable and

inconvenient. I’m really working from my memories and my personal experiences

and interpretations. I’m telling the story of what I have seen and how I felt about it.

Where did your practice begin and how has it evolved over time?

David - I trained as an animation filmmaker at a wonderful film school in Wales that now

doesn’t exist, at least not in the way it did. Then I went and studied film some more

at Warwick, and then I went into the world doing lots of different things, making films

and commercial projects, teaching, curating. I got a lot of life experience by really

following my instinct and allowing that and some luck to guide me. Living with Ian

has also been a huge influence on me, because both being artists we talk constantly

about art. The work I do now feels like the culmination of a lot of experimentation

over 20+ years since I graduated, but also I feel like I am just beginning. The world

has changed so much since I was an undergraduate, and I learned to not have

expectations and instead I just try to do my work.

What are you reading at the moment?

‘David - ‘The Longest Day’ by E. M. Forster

How do you see your work evolving in the future, and what new themes

or mediums interest you?

David - I would like to do more sculpture.

David Surman's Studio. 

As you may know, it is essential that we conclude with a studio playlist!

Please would you let me have a 5-10 track studio playlist? – this can be what

you are listening to now or an ultimate playlist.

Here’s five albums I have on rotation recently:

Weyes Blood -- An In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow

Casey Spooner -- With Love from Death Beach

Tindersticks -- The Something Rain

Miles Davis -- A Tribute to Jack Johnson

Chypho -- Entomongaku

Joseph Dilnot

Joseph Dilnot (b.1997) is a self-taught artist who primarily works in oil paint, creating personal mythologies rich with symbolism. His lyrical paintings depict imagined worlds, blending nature, history, and personal memories, often infused with gentle humor. Inspired by the landscapes of the English Channel and South Downs, Dilnot's work often features solitary figures journeying through mysterious, dreamlike settings, exploring themes of grief, hope, and wonder.

It has been over a year since Joseph Dilnot participated in Mothshell Ambit, the inaugural group exhibition at Weald Contemporary. Since then, Dilnot has garnered increasing attention from both national and international audiences, captivated by his unique artistic vision.

We took 5 minutes to catch up with him in the lead up to his current two-person exhibition ‘Life’ with David Surman.

Joseph Dilnot seated outside his Eastbourne studio 

Joe, would you start please by introducing yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself and your work.

Joseph - I was born and grew up in Brighton and now live in East Sussex and my paintings are a combination of personal experiences and memories as well as reference to history and folklore. 

I named the duo exhibition you are currently part of ‘Life’ as life is a key theme in both yours and David Surman’s work – a sense of energy, vitality and connection to animals seems abundant – where does this originate?

Joseph - since I was very young I have always taken an interest in the natural world. I still really enjoy learning the names of plants and what they do, identifying birdsong etc. I don’t really have any outdoor skills though, more of a fondness and openness to wandering around and finding something new when I go for a walk. I try to channel that into the paintings.

Joseph Dilnot, The Summit

You have shown your work in Sussex and the South quite regularly since your first exhibition with Weald Contemporary back in August 2023, is there a particular part of the world you would like to see your work exhibited in the future?

Joseph - Anywhere!

Do you feel like growing up in East Sussex has influenced your work?

Joseph - local landscape and my interpretation of its history do play a large part in the paintings. It is quite a low-key county with gently rolling hills and welcoming woodlands. Ever since I was a child I have filled these locations with imaginings of an epic history, strange events and phenomena, the paintings are a continuation of that. 

There is an otherworldliness to your work, do your dreams play a part in your subject matter?

Joseph - dreams certainly do. I try to switch my brain off to find a sweet spot between wake and sleep. For me, that's where the best ideas are hiding. 

Joseph Dilnot, Wanderer

What are your favourite books, which do you feel have had an influence on your painting?

Joseph -I’ve only really properly started reading this year as it’s something I’ve always struggled with. I’ve been reading more historical books recently, they can provide a lot of inspiration. If anyone wants to suggest something I should read, I'm very open. 

What are you reading at the moment?

Joseph - I am currently reading ‘The Anglo Saxons’ by Marc Morris. 

You once shared your ceramic work with me, which was of great interest, how do you see your work evolving in the future, and what new themes or mediums interest you?

Joseph - will certainly be returning to ceramics and sculpture in the future, I really do enjoy it and I think they accompany my paintings well. I’m open to working with anything as long as it serves the art and message I’m looking to deliver, all in good time! 

Thanks Joseph!

View artwork by Joseph Dilnot

John Harmer

In his new body of work Terrain John Harmer delves into the intriguing interplay between our natural surroundings and human-built structures. In his exploration of Sussex and beyond the artists paintings serve as a lens through which he reveals the hidden dynamics and tensions inherent in our environment.

In this major solo exhibition here at Weald Contemporary, Harmer invites us to contemplate the liminal space where the familiar meets the unknown, where the boundaries between natural beauty and civilisation blur and transform.

Please could you talk a bit about your exhibition with Weald Contemporary and how you landed upon the title Terrain?

John - My second exhibition with Weald Contemporary continues my exploration of the relationship between architecture and landscape. The title Terrain encapsulates the various depictions of landscape, but is also applicable to the textured surfaces of my canvases.  

Are there particular areas of West Sussex which hold a particular significance and are all of them represented literally or otherwise in the exhibition?

John - I have lived in Chichester my whole adult life. Elements of these familiar places inevitably show up in some of my paintings. Garden Wall and Yellow Chimney are the most literal representations of Chichester, based on my own photographs taken recently.  Others are not derived from a specific image but invented from memory, such as Stream, which is reminiscent of certain areas of Fishbourne.

You told me that your intimate painting of Bosham was from an old photograph, could you tell me more about this?

John - Very occasionally, I will use a specific photographic reference. My early childhood was spent in Bosham and it holds very fond memories for me. When I found some early snapshots of Bosham Quay, I felt compelled to make a small painting speaking to my nostalgia.

 Depictions of landscape and architecture in art and cinema provide some impetus and inspiration for your work, how has it been concentrating a little more on areas of Sussex that you know very well and explore frequently?

John - While I am mostly inspired by landscape and architecture as depicted in cinema and other mediums, I have found myself revisiting my local environment periodically throughout my career. As mentioned, recently I have begun applying some of the compositional lessons I have learned through looking at cinema to my observations whilst exploring Chichester on foot. I have enjoyed viewing the city through this new personal lens.

It is interesting that as an artist your work allows you to travel, not necessarily literally, but people keep in touch with you through the work, and so the work travels, the images travel, and therefore you’re not static either.

John - Yes, as you know, I'm not a traveller. It is gratifying that my paintings have found homes far and wide and that some collectors have stayed in touch over the years.

Most people know you as a painter, but we perhaps don’t know about your illustrative skills. Can you tell me a little about you work you do for Breathe Magazine?

John - My Breathe Magazine illustrations are built in layers, much like my paintings, they are created digitally using the Procreate app on my iPad. It took me a few months to find the right combination of digital brushes to reflect how I handle paint. I enjoy the breadth of topics that Breathe ask me to illustrate, including storm chasing, metal detection and local theatre.  

What are you reading at the moment?

John - Constructive Anatomy by George B. Bridgman, a key text for artists wrestling with the complex task of drawing and understanding the human figure.

How would you describe your painting process?

John - My current practice involves a heavy research phase scouring various sources for images that I find interesting. I then set those images aside and begin working intuitively directly on the canvas. The paintings are constructed swiftly in layers, often completed in a day - a benefit of using acrylic, a quick-drying paint.

You told me recently that if you had a larger studio space, you think your work would change, can you speak more about that?

John - There are both advantages and disadvantages of working at home. A larger studio would enable me to scale up the effects I have developed in my painting, and to produce much larger works. I could also be free to explore the sometimes messy techniques associated with abstract expressionism that I am interested in employing in my practice.

Could you finish by giving me a 5-10 song studio soundtrack please?

Sleaford Mods - Mork n Mindy

Danger Doom - Old School Rules

Father John Misty - Total Entertainment Forever

Dry Cleaning - Scratchyard Lanyard

The Band - The Weight

Weyes Blood - Grapevine

A Tribe Called Quest - Dis Generation (feat. Busta Rhymes)

Broadcast - Come On Let's Go

Public Service Broadcasting - Spitfire

Cardiacs - The Whole World Window

View artwork by John Harmer

Alice Macdonald

Alice Macdonald and Jessica Jane Charleston have been drawing together since 2016 when they first met at The Royal Drawing School in London. In our current exhibition Looking Glass, we see them deepen this connection, by spending time exploring the self-portrait and the intimacy of really looking at another person.

To continue in the spirit of their collaboration, we asked Jessica to interview Alice for this special edition of ‘In Conversation’ - enjoy!

Jessica - Having drawn alongside you since 2016 (Royal Drawing School era) I know you draw a lot! You’ll draw someone whilst you’re having a conversation with them. This requires a level of confidence about drawing, how have you reached this relaxed way of drawing?

 I think feeling relaxed while drawing mainly comes down to practice – I’ve drawn in a sketchbook since I was at school. It’s about multi-tasking, when you draw a lot it maybe it becomes kind of automatic, like driving, kind of like muscle memory. In fact usually if I think too much it ends up being a bad drawing. I love drawing people and talking to them. For some reason it makes a very intimate space, I think this might be about me concentrating on the person I am drawing, your attention being really focussed. I don’t know how you found it… but other friends have told me they like the sensation they are really being seen and looked at.  

  You lent me Paula Modersohn-Becker’s letters to read. I know how much you love her work. Is there a quote from that book or something about her work that you could share that’s inspired / encouraged you?

 Oh I think about Paula Modersohn-Becker a lot. I love her work. It's amazing to be able to read her letters and journals and hear her thoughts. I love her attitude to life, she’s so positive and excited to experience the world. I think about how much pleasure she seemed to derive from small things - an orange, or some violets bought from a market stall. And she was so adventurous, leaving her husband and moving to Paris on her own to be a painter. There’s one quote in particular I think about a lot – in her journal she says ‘I must learn how to express the gentle vibration of things’ I always wonder if she had any knowledge of physics and the concept that the world is made up of vibrating atoms and molecules. Even without the science, I love the idea of everything vibrating in gentle harmony and the vibrations being the fizzing of the alive-ness of the natural world. I hope I can express some of that sometimes in my work too.

Jessica - We’ve spoken a lot about working across different mediums, - paint, print, clay. & now embroidery. Can you talk about how this works for you and why you don’t just stick to one?

I think the main reason that I use different mediums is that I enjoy it. I think using different materials helps you to think in different ways, for example in print I think about the image in layers, and in clay I am thinking in 3-d.. These different perspectives on making allow the work to move in different directions… it keeps things fresh, and they feed each other, opening up different possibilities. It’s been really fun to work on the embroideries with you. I’ve enjoyed how sewing is very portable and clean, easy to do anywhere. For some reason I’ve felt more free with the picture plane in textiles – its feels ok to let things float around and not make too much sense spatially. It’s also been nice to work more from the imagination, because I am usually working from sketchbook drawings based in observation.

Jessica - You recently received a distinction at City & Guilds MA Fine Art. What did you learn about your practice during this time? 

 Well, On my BA I studied Illustration and a few years later, I studied (with you) at the Royal Drawing School. The Drawing School was an amazing course but it’s very practical, it’s all about drawing and making, and not so much about thinking why. I decided I wanted to return to study to dedicate time to researching and thinking about the conceptual side of my practice. I really loved writing a dissertation, and I think I learnt a lot in the process. I wrote it in a diary format and in it I explored the diaristic quality of my work. Virginia Woolf put it well when she said a diary is like a large hold-all or spacious drawer which is ‘so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind’. I’ve begun to see my practice as a similar space in which I can explore any thing that interests me. I work largely from images made from observation in my sketch book, which is also a sort of visual diary. I was really lucky to have some funding from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation that paid for my MA. This allowed me to stop working for the year and focus completely on the course, and I think having that time completely immersed in my practice was the most important thing I got from studying. Painting every day really pushed my work forward and my work did change a lot. I developed the way that I use collage and my materials have shifted a bit - I’ve started to mainly use pigments with glue (distemper) and canvas collage instead of oil.

Alice Macdonald, Nancy Looking Through Binoculars (What We Saw) Distemper, canvas and paper on canvas.

Jessica - You have a very arty family. All three of your brothers are artists / musicians/ poets. Were you encouraged early on to be creative? What was your earliest memory of creative play / art making?

 It’s true, I do have a very creative family! I think my parents are slightly confused about how this happened. (Neither of them are artists). My parents are both encouraging, but I would say that my artistic talents were nurtured most by paternal grandmother, Grandma Jane, who is an excellent watercolourist. When we lived in London she often looked after me and we did painting together. Grandma smokes a lot, and my memories are of the smell of cigarettes mingling with food cooking, radio three playing and I would be set up painting a still life with some onions or flowers. She also took me to see art - we often went to the Tate Britain and to the V and A.  She’s still someone I like to ask for advice from if I get stuck on a painting.

Jessica - There are recurring themes in your work - windows, trees, tables. Is symbolism important to your practice? 

Yes those are all motifs that re-occur… but I wouldn’t think of them as symbolic exactly, I don’t think they have a different symbolic meaning… but they are images that I am interested in and that I am compelled to paint again and again.. Windows I find very interesting because they give the opportunity for two images in one painting, and I just really enjoy the fun you can have with that. Inside and outside coexisting. I’ve been thinking a lot about looking, and how if your attention is out of the window - because you are looking out of it, then you are not seeing the inside as much, because you only really see one thing at a time. How to paint that, seeing and not seeing?  The trees I have been painting are mainly in my maternal grandmother, Grandma Vicky’s garden, which is next to my parent’s house. I've been drawing the garden a lot since she died a few years ago. She was an amazing gardener, and I’ve loved how the garden continues to grow, and flourish, even though Grandma is gone. It has been a way to think about life cycles, the seasons, time passing.  And the tables – well at home I love to sit around the kitchen table. I like long breakfasts and dinners. At a party, I like being in the kitchen. I like the table as a place that you meet and talk, and also it’s a place where you work – cooking and chopping at the kitchen table or painting at a studio table. A whole story could take place at a table. I also just enjoy painting wood grain and table cloth patterns. They’re things I enjoy.

Jessica - Can you tell us about a recent artwork / exhibition you encountered that you loved?

Recently I fulfilled a long-held ambition to go to Paris to see the lady and the unicorn tapestries in the Musée de Cluney. There are six of them and they are huge, maybe around three by four meters each and they were hung in a room making a space a bit like a tent. I think this is how they were intended to be, to make a draughty room more cosy by having wall to wall tapestries. I’m interested in how they create this kind of theatrical space, that’s something I’d love to explore more. I also love how although the imagery is very stylised and flattened, there is also a kind of realism, or sincerity in the portrayals of the plants and animals, which are depicted with careful attention and accuracy and are all real and identifiable species. They follow their own logic.

Alice Macdonald, Illeana In Paris (New Begginings), Distemper and canvas on canvas

Jessica - Your paintings can be very playful. Especially with the recent collaging effect of cutting up the canvas. You seem to be able to do this magical thing where you can draw / paint from life but bring a quality that tells us so much about your imagination. How do you achieve this? / do you enjoy portrait painting?

 I do really enjoy painting people from life when I get a chance. I think of it like doing a puzzle, trying to fit the pieces together, sometimes it’s just one small thing that you change and then suddenly, you have found something that looks like the person in front of you. I find that very satisfying. 

I don’t know about the other part of the question. I think if anything magical happens it sort of happens by accident- In fact I kind of feel like it has to happen by accident. Sometimes it feels like you are searching for a surprise, for the work to do something by itself. Perhaps with the collage I am really looking for that, a collaged shape can disrupt the image and it allows for things to happen without my hand or brush marks present? 

Jessica - I’ve really enjoyed making double portraits with you. Us both looking in the mirror and drawing each other at the same time. Quadruple portraits! What’s your relationship with self-portraiture? 

 I’ve really enjoyed drawing with you too. There’s something very relaxing about it. And exhilarating! And intimate. It has been good to get to know your face so well, at first I found it quite a challenge to draw you… but as time went on I feel like I got better. I’ve enjoyed the theme of drawings of us drawing - as artists, perhaps it is important that we are female artists, and in the double portraits we are both the subject and the artist - like that - it feels quite democratic? I’ve always enjoyed making self-portraits. For me they are usually a way to practice painting, I am always my most available model. And working directly from observation is always a good thing for me to do if I get stuck in the studio. To just think about the way to paint, instead of what to paint.

Jessica - We both inherited embroidery threads from our Grandmothers leading to two large embroideries for this exhibition. Tell me about your Grandma, were you close?

I think I am so lucky to have been very close to both of my grandmothers. I’ve said about how I used to paint with my Grandma Jane. The Grandma who’s threads I have been using was my mum’s mum, Grandma Vicky. From the age of 11 we lived next door to her in rural Oxfordshire. I would say we were very close, she was really like my third parent. Often I’d go to her house for the evening, and she regularly drove me to the bus stop and picked me up from school. She was an extraordinary woman. Famous for giving extremely backhanded compliments and being very hardy, never having the heating on, never admitting to being ill, never admitting food was mouldy! She wasn’t an artist but she was a great gardener and she did a lot of embroidery. There were lots of cushions she embroidered in her house, some that she made as a child and some that she made in her old age. In Longworth church there are lots of kneeling cushions she made after her husband died. They all have different images but they all say ‘In memory of David Faulkner’ along the sides. She wasn’t really someone who talked about her emotions or feelings, so imagining her sewing all these cushions, the slow and meditative process, while she must have been grieving, I’ve always found very moving. But she was a great one for getting on with things. I miss her a lot. I’m sure if she could read this she’d think I was being overly sentimental, and say ‘don’t be so ridiculous’, but I think she’d be very interested in our embroideries. And I’m sure she’d have plenty of (constructive) criticisms.

Alice Macdonald, Self Portrait, Distemper and hessian on canvas

Jessica - I love the use of collage in your paintings and how you describe your use of it. ‘The collage is clumsy and imprecise, it distorts and disrupts the image – confusing our perception of space, creating unexpected depth and a simultaneous feeling of flatness.’ How did you come about working in this way? 

I think the collage started from a collage-like way of working I developed in printmaking using Tetrapack (juice cartons) in small pieces and collaging them together in a print. From thinking about layers and collage in the print I started to think about them in the paintings too. I started collaging over bits of a painting I didn’t like. Then it just kind of spiralled. I like the idea that the collage shows it’s working – it is clumsy, and there is a feeling that you could move it around again, that the image is unstable – and this is like the instability of a memory, of an image.

Jessica - What’s next? 

 What’s next! Lots more drawing and painting hopefully. I have some exhibitions coming up in June in London with Oliver Projects, Manchester at Contemporary 6 Gallery, and in China with EY Gallery. I’m looking forward to the summer, and hopefully a little holiday at some point. And then in November I will have a two person show with our good friend Joana Galego at Soho Revue. I feel really lucky to have been able to work on two exhibitions this year with good friends, it’s been a really special way to make work and I feel like I’ve been learning a lot in the process.

Top 5 Studio Soundtrack? ……

I don't normally listen to music in the studio, usually I listen to audio books. Music is often too distracting, maybe too emotional? I find listening to audio books works because I get so into the book that the painting kind of goes on autopilot, part of my brain is occupied with the book and another part is doing the painting and thinking less, if that makes any sense at all? I like a variety of fiction and non fiction here are some I listened to in the last couple of months - 

On Chapel Sands by Laura Cummings

Second Place by Rachel Cusk 

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

All That I Am by Anne Funder

A Room With A View by EM Forster

I listen to music normally as a break to bring myself back to reality or on the way to the studio here are some tracks that I keep coming back to: 

Life's A Gas T rex

I often listen to this song on the cycle home from the studio. 

Souverian by Andrew Bird

I'm really enjoying the whole album this is on- Nobel Beast by Andrew Bird.  

The Best Is Yet To Come by This Is The Deep

This is The Deep is my brother Ranny’s band, and my two brothers Angus and Hector are in it too. So I am a bit biased but really think they’re so good, Ranny is an incredible song writer and musician, well they all are actually. I recently started singing with them (just the backing vocals) I find it terrifying but also very uplifting to sing with the bank, being an artist is often so solitary so it’s nice to do something in a kind of team effort.

Ropa Vieja by Family Time 

A band I recently discovered but really like! 

Run That Body Down by Paul Simon

Paul Simon is one of my favourites, love his lyrics, hard to choose one but I think this is a great one. 

Looking Glass is open now and runs until 7 June

The Mill Studio

New House Farm Barns,

Ford Lane,

Arundel

BN18 0EF

Current opening times:

Thursday-Saturday

10am-3pm

Sunday 10am-1pm

Other times possible by appointment

Jessica Jane Charleston

Alice Macdonald and Jessica Jane Charleston have been drawing together since 2016 when they first met at The Royal Drawing School in London. In our current exhibition Looking Glass, we see them deepen this connection, by spending time exploring the self-portrait and the intimacy of really looking at another person.

To continue in the spirit of their collaboration, we asked Alice to interview Jessica for this special edition of ‘In Conversation’ - enjoy!

Alice - We met at the Royal Drawing School, and we did a lot of observational drawing together. How does drawing fit into your practice now?

A lot. I’d say drawing makes up most of my practice. Observational drawing is often the starting point. In the studio, I will begin with a drawing from life, most of the time a self-portrait. I then go about transforming this observational drawing using my imagination. A horse wanders in. Another person sits down. An interaction happens. The merging of these two worlds is most revealing and fascinating to me. Drawing is so accessible, I draw in bed, I draw on the train, I draw with my 4 year old son. I love it, and I make sure I do it every day because I love it so much.

Alice - I know one thing you were interested in when we started working towards the show was working more from observation. How do you think the drawing sessions we’ve had have fed into the studio work?

Yes. Although I often use observational drawing as a starting point, I don’t exhibit these very often. I am more interested in what comes from these. It has been great to have so many drawings from life to work with. I’ve especially enjoyed the double portraits. Both drawing at the same time. This meeting. It’s a very intimate exchange. Your guard is down, you are the artist looking, but then you’ll glance up at the same time, and catch eye contact and realise you are being watched as well. Both artist and model. I have been painting and drawing from these observational drawings, but they are never direct interpretations, they get transformed by my imagination. The double portraits have emphasised my interest in the shadow self. (Carl Jung came up with the idea of ‘the shadow’ side to the self, which is often the part we see as hard to bear, like sadness, anger, shame). I am playing with this idea in the studio, the two figures, one which we present to the world and the other a more secret self, and the relationship between these two.

Alice - I know usually you often work from your imagination and this intrigues me a lot. How do you decide what to draw/paint? how do you start a piece of work?

I have different ways of starting but I think the main thing is allowing what wants to emerge, emerge. A bit like automatic writing. I just keep drawing, enjoying the colour, the pattern, the line, and something interesting reveals itself. I loved the interview with Lorna Robertson (and Andrew Cranston) at The Royal Drawing School recently where she talked about this. About elevating the doodles, about having the confidence to doodle on a 12ft canvas.

Alice - You work a lot with the self portrait, could you talk about self portraits and why they are important for you?

I remember being asked to draw a self-portrait in art class, when I was about 15, and being a very self-conscious teenager I found it excruciating, staring at myself in the mirror. Trying to get it right,trying not to be too flattering, seeing all my worries being played out on my face in front of me. Out of this uncomfortable feeling came curiosity, I returned to it, and in my own bedroom found solace and strength in this exercise. It was a way to check in with myself, to convey fears, to celebrate them, to control and minimise them. The drawing was me but it was also a character I could direct. I think that’s when I really got interested in psychological figurative painting. I found Egon Schiele and Tracey Emin. Later, Paula Rego. These artists transformed the figure, the self- portrait, charged them up with emotion. I continue to be drawn to the self-portrait.

Alice - Often your figures are with animals – horses, snakes, swans, dogs… what symbolism do they carry for you? How do they arrive in the drawings/paintings?

The animals seem to arrive on their own, they let themselves in. The dogs feel new. I’m not sure about them - They could well be influenced by Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, which I loved. But I remember the birds, they came into the work during the pandemic. They emerged from pattern, in my imaginative works, I try to let my hand create the shapes, without thinking, and one of the recurring shapes / patterns was this curving line which turned into feathers, then birds. It was suggested that the reason I was drawing birds at that time, locked in our homes, was due to that longing, the bird so free, I didn’t make that connection at the time, but I love that connection now. Later, the birds lost their wings and their long necks evolved into snakes. A much more foreboding creature. I enjoy playing with that symbol of apparent evil and at times making it friendly and playful.

One of the reasons I thought it would be interesting to do a show together is that we are both quite multimedia – you make things out of clay and you also do a lot of printmaking.

How do these different processes fit in to your broader practice?

Yes I love that connection. It has been really good to have you to talk to about working in multiple disciplines since leaving the drawing school. It’s odd when I think about it, because at university, I did Fine Art and was encouraged to experiment but I just didn’t want to, I just wanted to deepen my understanding of drawing. And that’s more or less what I did for three years. (Which is a shame, I feel now) Then when I left, I became free-er, I started making hand-printed books with a bookbinder friend, I got into printmaking through accidentally acquiring presses and even ended up setting up the darkroom I inherited from my Grandma in our shed. I still like to experiment, I think it enhances my understanding of my practice overall. Clay is very new to me but I would like to do more with it. The clay figures were lovely to make in the early days of my son Lowen. I could carve out shapes and figures whilst he napped. It was easy to dip in and out. And now we have added embroidery to our list Alice!

Alice - Do you feel that different mediums, for example printmaking, give you different languages? … would you say you make different work depending on what medium you are working in?

Does the subject matter choose the material or does the material affect the subject matter?

I wouldn’t be satisfied committing to one way of working. I love having the different ways to express myself. That’s a nice way to describe it - different languages. I, to my shame, can only speak English, (having attempted French, Spanish and German badly), I have a friend who is English who says she feels more herself when she speaks French. I can understand that in terms of medium. There’s a clean, tight exactness in the linocut prints. There is a method, it satisfies my perfectionist tendencies. But it cannot compare to the stomping of a big fat brush of paint on canvas or paper. The sweetness of clay and the forgiving nature of sewing. I need them all as a soothing tonic.

Alice - How does your son Lowen and being a mother influence your work? Or Does it at all?

My work has been hugely influenced by being a mother. When I got pregnant I decided to move out of the studio I’d been in for 7 years. It was just too far away from where we were living, I set up a studio in our shed, and snatched an hour or so of studio / shed time when he napped or when he was with his dad, Jonny, my partner. I learned something amazing about my practice, I learned that I could feel just as connected, if not more so, from these small slices of time to draw, as long as they were regular, as long as it happened every day or nearly every day. I’d got into a routine before Lowen of saving my ‘time to make art’ for my studio days, which was 2 or 3 days a week, and the rest of the time I worked or socialised. But when Lowen came along I snuck it in, wherever I could, and realised this was far more beneficial for me. I got back in touch with drawing from life, I drew me and Lowen together a lot, playing with the well worn mother and child image. When I was breastfeeding him I drew him a lot more, I think because he was such an extension of my body, but since then I see him as another figure, I’m learning how to bring him back into my drawings at the moment. He has been enjoying posing whilst I draw him, usually with his tongue sticking out.

Alice - Coincidentally, we both used our Grandmothers threads to work on our collaborative embroideries. What was your grandmother like and do you think she would approve of this project?

Ahh I’m so happy for this coincidence. She would have whole-heartedly approved. She was wonderful, my Grandma, Ann Horn. I see her as the first artist I was introduced to. She had a black and white dark room at the top of her house, and I remember the excitement of being in there together when I was little. The red light, the magic of the photo appearing in the chemicals. My first experience of a woman in her studio. I lived with her in Cambridge during my Art Foundation year. Just the two of us. I felt like we really got to know each other during that year and connected with our love of making and solitude. We’d often be in the house together working on our own things. Grandma sat embroidering, me chucking paint around in my bedroom. We lived and worked well together. She was hugely supportive of my drawings, and was the first person to commission a drawing. I felt very honoured as she had great taste and I don’t think she was just trying to flatter me! I miss her.

Alice - Which artist(s) (dead or alive) would you most like to invite for dinner?

Ooh. I wonder what Alice Neel and Louise Bourgeois would be like in a room together. Would they get on? I’d like to be there for that conversation. Such different work, and ways of approaching work, but both outspoken, powerful women and mothers - Two of my absolute favourites. Frida Kahlo, obviously, I mean everyone would invite Frida, she’d bring the dinner party to life. Artists alive - I would love to have lunch with Vanessa Baird, Chantal Joffe and Katherine Bradford. I feel like I would learn a lot from these artists, working today.

Top 5 Studio Playlist

I have a cd player in the studio, and I love to play it loudly, in the evenings especially when I’m unlikely to disturb anyone. So, I listen to albums. The album I’m currently obsessed with, (and I do get obsessed), is Adrianne Lenker’s new album Bright Future. (We saw her at The Barbican a few weeks ago and she was wonderful) I think the last time Alice was in the studio I played the new album at least 3 times. It changes, but my favourite track on that album at the moment, is Donut Seam.

1. Donut Seam

The second album I play regularly in the studio is Scout Niblett’s Kidnapped by Neptune. I have a long-term love affair with this one. I love her voice, so sweet, so wild. The lyrics are brilliant, and the album is raw. When I saw her play, I loved it most when it was just her behind her drum kit shouting / singing. 

2. Scout Niblett – F*ck Treasure Island 

The other 3 tracks are ones I have on repeat. The Diane Cluck and Shilpa Ray ones are both only about a minute long! Very grounding and beautiful. But the Fake ID track is the best for energy. It makes me dance. It’s a good one to play after lunch in the studio. 

3. Diane Cluck - Lucifer

4. Shilpa Ray - New York Minute Prayer

5. Riton, Kah-Lo - Fake ID

Looking Glass is open now and runs until 7 June

The Mill Studio

New House Farm Barns,

Ford Lane,

Arundel

BN18 0EF

Current opening times:

Thursday-Saturday

10am-3pm

Sunday 10am-1pm

Other times possible by appointment

Coco Crampton

Coco Crampton’s aesthetic has developed through “A process of borrowing, hi-jacking and reinterpreting from various periods in design history”. Coco's non-medium-specific practice reflects her dynamic and exploratory approach to making work, allowing for a fluid movement between different processes and materials.

This flexibility enables the artist to draw from a diverse range of techniques and traditions, including knitting, carpentry, ceramics, and printmaking, each offering its own unique set of possibilities. We caught up with Coco in advance of Plans for Living, her two-person exhibition with Louise Bristow.

Coco, Your work has an element of playfulness which is expressed through a range of mediums, how do you feel the different processes and materials work to communicate your ideas?

Coco: I’ve wanted to make installations that affect environments or mini universes which could include any object you might find in past or present material culture, tables, clothing, pots, chairs, architecture etc. Everything I present as an artwork can be seen in some way as found, it might be literally a found object, or a 3D facsimile recreated from an image or textbook, or as is the case with the pots shown in Plans for Living, found through participation in a tradition or craft - my quilted and knitted pieces would be in this category too. Although these finds bring with them memories from their past lives, when brought into my work they are affected and changed, and don’t necessarily operate as we might expect.

Image: Left: Louise Bristow, The Expedition (detail). Right: Coco Crampton, Wall Murmur

Where did your practice begin and how has it evolved over time?

Coco: I was born into an Acme house in East London in the early ‘80’s, and my childhood was spent in Norfolk where I grew up with my three siblings. My dad is an abstract painter and my mum was a textile artist. They ran a picture framing business and craft shop, supporting local artists and makers.

I studied painting for my BA at Norwich School of Art and Design but by the time I graduated I was making sculptural installations; my practice has continued to be predominantly three-dimensional ever since. I was lucky to graduate just as OUTPOST gallery was being founded in Norwich, and I became involved with the group of artists who were running the gallery and working in the city at the time. I didn’t have a studio but I kept being offered opportunities and finding ways to make work, either by getting help from friends who had access to workshops or making work in situ for exhibitions.

I started working with ceramics in 2008 when I moved to Yorkshire to start up a pottery. My term on the OUTPOST Steering Committee was due to end and I still hadn’t found a way to establish my own studio in Norwich, I needed a new adventure. I taught myself how to throw and started to build a business making hand-thrown domestic ware; I was interested in the kind of symbiotic relationship between art, life and work that had been a principle of design movements such as the Omega Workshops, the Bauhaus School, the Wiener Werkstätte and Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. Although, after two years the business side of the pottery wasn’t a success, I took away from the experience the ability to throw, a relationship with the UK studio pottery tradition and love of Chinese, Korean and Japanese pottery. Without which the loose throwing, pulled handles, sense of organic growth and inevitability of form, visible in the pots shown in the present exhibition, wouldn’t have been possible.

In 2011 I re-entered education at the Royal Academy Schools in London, where I graduated with a postgraduate diploma in 2014. In the years following, my practice became more studio-based and I gradually set myself up to make ceramics again; picking up the skills from where I’d left off and using them to make sculptural pieces. All the sculptures in Plans for Living were thrown in my studio in London on a Leach kick wheel; they are glazed in glazes I mixed myself from raw materials and fired in an electric kiln.

Image: Coco Crampton Ceramics, Left to right: Can, Night Feeder, Down Pour, Swig, Spooler.

You enjoy playing with the language of objects can you talk a little about what draws you to design history?

Coco: I revisit objects from the past which were designed with a promise of some other way of living by designers attempting to reimagine the world and offer the possibility of a better existence. I’m interested in design failures as much as celebrated design icons, and the way a piece of furniture or an object can present a set of ideals, propose a solution, or reflect something about the society it is made for. By looking back at design movements, I try to tap into some of the energy that drove them and attempt to rekindle design aspirations that I feel are still relevant in the present day.

Coco: Your exhibition Plans for Living with Louise Bristow surrounds a common interest in the concept that form follows function and an artefact’s other functionality beyond being a jug or a chair, for example, how it can describe a place and time by its design. Can you talk a little more about your work included in the exhibition?

I’m excited about the exhibition because it will be the first time I’ve had the opportunity to single out a group of my pots, and show them in a more pared down way, and also to see what new conversations emerge when they are brought into relationship with Louise’s paintings. I’m showing a series of ceramics which resemble useable domestic pots, maquettes for architectural forms, or machines with an unknown purpose; they have tubelike protrusions attached to them that appear to be handles or spouts; they’re human in scale and there’s a sense of familiarity about them, however, they’re kind of impersonators really and don’t perform the functions they allude to. A few of them have titles which reference the act, necessity, or pastime of drinking, e.g. Night Feeder.

Image: Coco Crampton, Night Feeder

You also make knitted pieces that you have described as being quite nomadic and absorbing influence from the different atmospheres they are gradually made in, giving the finished pieces a slightly diaristic quality. Can you speak more about this?

Coco: Handknitting is unusual amongst the processes I work with, insomuch as it is not workshop/studio dependent and can be easily transported. I might knit a few rows on a train journey and then another few rows whilst waiting for my child to wake from a nap, another few whilst watching a film. The tension in each stitch and row varies ever so slightly, retaining something of what I was doing or thinking at the time.

What are you reading at the moment?

Coco: Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Yellow Wall-paper and Other Stories

Could you tell me about your connection with the Charleston Farmhouse and how your lampshades came to be there?

Coco: I visited the house for the first time in 2013 and was intrigued by the colander-shaped ceramic lampshades that I saw dotted about, particularly the one hanging over Vanessa Bell’s table in the dining room. I started to think about what these objects had witnessed over the years and subsequently made a series of ceramic lampshades, The Truth About Cottages, for an exhibition in London. These then became part of a commissioned installation at Charleston, which also includes a large circular dining table, Horse Rub. These pieces are particularly important to me because they are in constant public use, activated by, and activating, people.

Image: Coco Crampton, Swig.

How do you see your work evolving in the future, and what new themes or mediums interest you?

Coco: I’ve recently made some new sculptures from plaster impregnated bandage and painted in household paint, I’m excited to see where they go and how they might sit alongside other works.

The title for this show Plans for Living is a theme that has interested me for a long time and I imagine will continue to do so, as I keep turning it over and looking at it from different perspectives. As a mother of a two-year-old, I spend a lot of time considering how the world looks from a child’s point of view - perhaps this will start to influence the work I make in the future.

As you may know, it is essential that we conclude with a studio playlist!

Please would you let me have a 5-10 track studio playlist? – this can be what you are listening to now or an ultimate playlist.

1. Little Brown Jug: Elizabeth Cotten

2. Children’s Songs: No.5: Chick Corea

3. Homesickness, Pt.2 : Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru

4. Evolution: Ablaye Cissoko

5. Mother’s Love: The Vernon Spring

Ceramic artworks pictured, courtesy of Coco Crampton and Belmacz

Plans for Living runs from April 20 - 10 May 2024

Opening Hours:

10am - 3pm Thursday -Sunday

Location:
Weald Contemporary at The Mill Studio
New House Farm Barns
Ford Lane
Arundel
BN18 0EF

By car: From central Arundel, Head South-West on Ford Road, slow past Ford Lane, turning right immediately after, follow the tourist sign for The Mill Studio.

By Train: Regular Services from London Victoria, Brighton and Southampton Central to Ford station. Walk south-west on Ford Road, continue past Ford Lane, turn right onto the footpath signposted for the Mill Studio.


All welcome but please leave pets in our courtyard or at home.

Louise Bristow

Everyday objects can provide a profound insight into history, reflecting the society that created them and the ideology of the period in which they were conceived.

In Plans for Living, Louise Bristow and Coco Crampton explore the idea that form follows function and encourages us to look more closely at structure, symbolism, conventions and absurdities of human life.

We caught up with Louise to find out more about her practise….

Louise, Your work has an element of playfulness, would you agree and if so how

important is this in communicating your ideas?

Louise: I’d agree with this. I approach my work with a playful attitude, in that I take pleasure in

making it, and I see my studio as a place where I can be curious and explore whatever I want to.

I never know where something will lead, and so making a piece of work that initially seems silly or

meaningless might be exactly the right thing to do. I also think play is a really basic characteristic of

being alive. I remember the feeling of being a child and just ‘making stuff’ with no particular end in

mind, simply that this was the way I wanted to spend my time. This feeling of fulfilment, of being

deeply engaged, is what I am trying to recreate when I’m working.

Can you explain the process of constructing the environments you go on to

paint and where you find your source materials?

Louise: I create table-top set-ups in my studio, which I draw and paint from. These set-ups look a bit

like miniature stage sets and include models that I make, (often based on buildings and

architectural structures that I have seen in real life and photographed) as well as flat elements, like

photographs from books, pieces of patterned or coloured paper and bits of packaging that I’ve

found in charity shops or markets. By working with these solid things that I can hold and move

around I’m able to create a composition that I can then paint from. It’s a really different process

from working out a composition by making preparatory sketches on paper. My working process

allows me to deal with material (images, objects, ideas) that interests me. The decisions I make about

what to include are subjective, not governed by any faithfulness to scale or chronology, so I might

place an illustration of a prehistoric flint axehead next to a photograph of a tram from 1930s Berlin.

I’m thinking about what these images mean to me, not personally but in terms of when they were

made, what they signify. There is a sense of narrative created by combining these different

elements, but I’m aware that the narrative is not fixed and is going to be different for everyone

looking at the painting. That’s fine, I’m not trying to communicate a message, I just want to work with

this content, but I’m not sure what I’m trying to say - that arises from making the painting, and even

then I can’t really put it into words.

Your exhibition Plans For Living with Coco Crampton surrounds a common

interest in the concept that form follows function and an artefact’s other

functionality beyond being a jug or a chair, for example, how it can describe a

place and time by its design. Can you talk a little more about your work

included in the exhibition?

Louise: I’m very interested in how any human-made artefact tells us something about the context in

which it has been made. not only it’s function but also its design and aesthetics will be determined by

the values of the society that created it. Most of the images I use in my set-ups come from older

books and magazines, pre-1970s. Printing from these eras has a very particularly quality to it, and

of course what is represented and how it is depicted is completely of its time. I re-use some of the

same motifs in different paintings, so for example in both Commuters and Cenotaph I’ve used

the same turquoise and grey structure, which is actually a model I made of a bit of street furniture,

a lighting/advertising unit outside the Haus des Lehrers (House of the teacher) in Alexanderplatz,

Berlin. The paintings Factory,Cenotaph and Substructure all feature a model of the corner of the

John Lewis building on Oxford Street. It’s a great piece of modern architecture and I use it to signify

modernist values, as well as for its visual qualities - its muted colour, the repetition of strong

horizontal and vertical lines. The building has a Barbara Hepworth sculpture on one of its facades,

which I recreated on my model but isn’t visible in these particular paintings. I am loathe to identify

every element in my paintings because I don’t see the point of doing this. And also it’s enjoyable

when someone recognises for themselves some element, or it has resonance for them. They don’t

need me to tell them what it ‘means’, and in any case I don’t believe this is how meaning in art

functions.

What are you reading at the moment?

Louise:The Judas Rose by Suzette Haden-Elgin, which is the second novel in a science fiction trilogy

set several centuries in the future about a group of female linguists developing a secret language

for women.

Architecture, Modernism and the Communist experience are all quite prominent themes in your

constructed landscapes, could you share what draws you to these subjects?

Louise: I don’t have any familial link to Eastern Europe or Russia but I did grow up at the end of the

Cold War; this was the world conflict that defined my teenage years in the 1980s. I’m sure this had

an effect, as did visiting the USSR, Poland and Berlin when I was a student. For all its deficiencies,

and despite the many crimes committed in its name, Communism was at least an alternative to the

Capitalist model. It was the daily experience of millions of people for decades, and I am curious

about what this was like, which has led me to explore the books, films and art made in these times.

The other side of the coin is that many things about Capitalism are very harmful, criminal and

unjust, but we (in the West) seem unwilling to question its dominance or legitimacy in the world. The

different ways we humans have of organising ourselves interest me, and Modernism was a

utopian project which attempted to design a better world, with more effective and beautiful homes,

objects, clothing, urban environments etc. I find this inspiring.

You studied printmaking at Brighton University and have been co-director of East Side print CIC

since 2020, what stemmed your interest in the process?

Louise: I realised over time that I enjoy the process of deconstructing an image in order to remake

it, which can be a characteristic of printmaking. It’s not an immediate activity, like drawing or

painting, where you’re applying marks directly to a surface. Printmaking usually happens at one

remove, via a block, plate or screen that creates the image, and I actually enjoy the distance that

the process gives you. So having studied painting and then printmaking I find it interesting that I’ve

developed this process for making paintings that is really protracted; first making the models and

finding and preparing the collage elements, in order to then arrange a set-up, and then eventually

paint it.

Can you recommend any good resources for artists in Brighton and the

surrounding area?

Louise: Well obviously East Side Print in Kemptown! This is the screenprint studio I run with my two

co-directors, Cath Bristow and Jane Fox, where you can learn how to screenprint on paper or

fabric and then join as a member when you feel confident to work independently. And just around

the corner from us is Bip-Art, a studio which specialises in the printmaking techniques we don’t do;

lithography, etching and relief (woodcuts and linocuts). I have a space at Phoenix Art Space, which is

a large building in the centre of Brighton housing over 100 artists’ studios, as well as a gallery and

education programme. There’s often something interesting going on at Phoenix, and there’s a nice

café! Fabrica and ONCA are two fantastic independent spaces that both have programmes of

exhibitions, workshops, events and film screenings.

As you may know, it is essential that we conclude with a studio playlist!

Please would you let me have a 5-10 track studio playlist? – this can be what

you are listening to now or an ultimate playlist.

Louise: I don’t often listen to music in my studio, I tend to listen to podcasts or audiobooks. I do love

music, I just don’t like listening to it when I paint. Here’s a list of some songs I like listening

to at the moment, just not in the studio.

The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra by Anna Von Hausswolff

Babies by Pulp

Minor Work (CloudsRemix) by Suuns

Bizarre Love Triangle by New Order

VCR by The XX

Podcast: I’m enjoying The Guardian’s Black Box

View artwork by Louise Bristow

Lucinda Oestreicher

In our latest exhibition A Moment In Time Catherine Knight and Lucinda Oestreicher capture natural landscapes distilled in time.

Lucinda Oestreicher’s current work is an embodied conversation with the landscape of East Sussex. She encounters this place through the rhythm of walking, pausing as she becomes aware of a particular configuration of shapes as they align and freeze in a moment in time.

We spoke to Lucinda in the lead up to her exhibition at Weald Contemporary to find out more…..

Lucinda, would you begin by telling us a bit about yourself?

Lucinda: I grew up in London and now work in London and East Sussex. In the last few years my work has been influenced by my passion for walking and now walking has become an essential part of my research for painting.

You studied painting at Bath Spa University in 1979, at that time the course had been moved out of the town and into the village of Corsham, you remember this time fondly, describing it as an ‘idyllic’ place to study. Please can you tell us about your time there?

Lucinda: I chose to go to art college at what was Bath Academy of Art - based in Corsham, because of it’s reputation and because it was deep in the countryside of Wiltshire. It was a tiny college, only 100 students over the 3 years in Fine Art, Graphics and Ceramics. As students we lived in old stone cottages in the hills and valleys near the college, sometimes with an outside bathroom. It was an idyllic life to be in the middle of nowhere but have the sustenance and community of art college life. I ran the Film club there and projected 16mm films of obscure works from the bfi archive catalogue in the old barn. Some of us also spent time at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp to protest against the cruise missiles stored there. From there I went to Central School of Art on the Postgraduate Printmaking course, while running the screen printing studio back in Corsham as the technician. I went to the Slade as a Postgraduate where I experimented with film and video as well as printmaking. Since the Slade I have returned to painting but am still inspired by film and use photography as a tool for composition and research.

Red Trees, 30 x 40cm oil on board 2023 Downs & Winchelsea

How did you come to teach yourself?

Lucinda: I didn’t get to teaching until my late 40’s, I was living as an artist and running a decorating business on the side. I gave this up to start working in the painting department at the City Lit adult education college in Holborn. I really enjoyed developing courses such as ‘Ways into Abstract Painting’ and ‘Extended Drawing for Artists and Makers’ to allow the students to experiment hands on with different aspects of contemporary painting practices. Teaching really changed my own work as I found that creating courses for students made me unpick my own approaches to painting and re-think my practice. I have now been teaching there for 18 years and still enjoy teaching one day a week with my dedicated artist/ students on the Contemporary Painting Studio course.

You had an interesting childhood, encouraged to be free and creative, could you tell us more about life growing up?

Lucinda: I grew up in London in big family with four brothers, one half-sister and 2 step sisters. We were quite a big gang of unruly, scruffy kids and we loved to play football in the Islington streets and rampage around Hampstead Heath building dens. We lived in ramshackle houses in what was at the time called a bohemian lifestyle, with no conventional rules. My mother, Maggie Evans, was an artist who came from Wigan to go to the Slade in the 1950’s. She escaped from quite a repressive background where she didn’t fit in and completely created her own way of life in London. Her contemporaries at the Slade were David Storey, Paula Rego, Victor Willing, Anne Norman and Lucien Freud among others. She made our childhood full of colour and always encouraged us to be creative and resourceful as we didn’t have much money. My father was American and used to having the great outdoors to explore. He would take us out into the countryside at weekends to stay in remote cottages, or camp wild by rivers and cook on an open fire, which gave me a great love of being outdoors.

Farm Track, 30 x 40 oil on board 2022 Winchelsea

What is it about the Sussex countryside that keeps you returning to it as a subject matter?

Lucinda: When I was a child we used to stay at this tiny cottage near Glynde, Lewes which had no electricity. My stepfather hand-printed wallpaper for Peggy Angus who rented the cottage from Dick the Farmer. It was a magical place to be in and discover the Downs, particularly the Dewpond; a great dip in the ridge of hills, like an amphitheatre, full of space and air and the sound of larks. There is a special chalky light here and always huge skyscapes and wild wind. In the painting ‘Furlongs’ this is the view from Firle Beacon – seeing the cottage from far above, over 50 years later. Like looking down at my past from very far away. Now I spend as much time as possible here in the Downs following the chalk footpaths that wind amongst the hills. It is the height of these hills, and the far reaching views that give a feeling of flying above the flat plains that I find compelling.

The fact that it is a farmed landscape and there are traces of human intervention going back in time is also interesting to me, this isn’t a remote detached mountain wilderness. I love that mixture of wildness and ordinary domesticity in the turn of a footpath, the old stile or gatepost, and yet it’s possible to be quite alone in the wildness of the elements.

Cuckmere 50 x 60cm oil on board 2024 Downs

Could you speak a little about the paintings included in your current exhibition at Weald Contemporary with Catherine Knight ‘A Moment in Time’

Lucinda: The works in this exhibition span from 2018 – 2024.

During this time especially because of lockdown I was able to spend more time in the countryside and walking the same paths repeatedly made me look at moments and places in a deeper way. Many of them are from the area around Winchelsea in East Sussex, and the later ones come out of exploring the footpaths of the South Downs.

Around Winchelsea the Military Canal, the shingle levels of Rye Harbour and Winchelsea Beach, with it’s gravel pits changing shape with every storm and downpour became exciting forms. Now I’m getting to know the contours and atmospheres of local walks here in the Downs, it takes some time of repeated walking for me to be able to absorb and put this landscape into my work. Some of the paintings refer to both areas eg Red Trees which started as a Winchelsea landscape but has now merged with a windswept Downland walk.

My current paintings are a response to the visual and physical experience of exploring these landscapes. Walking through the same local places in all seasons, seeing them in motion, from the rhythm of a walk, then stopping when a particular configuration of shapes aligns and freezing that moment in time in a photograph or drawing, to be referenced back in the studio.

In the studio the process of painting takes over and images evolve through reworking, erasure and overpainting. I’m interested in the balance between what needs to be made explicit and the power of absence.

Shadows and reflections change in shape and density at different times of day and season. In the paintings they become solid forms, as important as any other objects. The fences and field boundaries are dynamic dividing lines carving up the space on the painting’s surface. Tracing the same paths over time a painting may hold within it numerous moments. Images of different walks and memories of engagement with specific places overlap. These moments of repetition and identification co-exist, overlap and interrupt in conversation with each other.

 This conversation is about being with and within the landscape.  I get to know the sense of a place by walking through it, then working with it over time in the studio. This changes the place next time I come across it – I experience a sense of recognition and special relationship, like meeting an old and familiar friend.

Bridge, 9 x 23cm oil on board 2022 Winchelsea

What are you reading at the moment?

Lucinda: Books and films are really important to me and influence my work in the same way that other artists do. Some of these are – artists Prunella Clough, Keith Vaughan, Susan Absalom, writers Nan Shepherd, Janet Frame, Edward Thomas, William Carlos Williams and Jane Bowles. The films of Werner Herzog and Jane Campion, and the early films of Wim Wenders. At the moment I’m reading Jean Rhys – her biography by Miranda Sawyer and her collected works. I can’t believe how modern her work feels, how ‘in the moment’ yet she was writing 100 years ago.

As you may know, it is essential that we conclude with a studio playlist! Please would you let me have a 5-10 track studio playlist?

Lucinda:

S Bach – All his work but at the moment the Cello suites and The Chaconde - Partita in D minor and Chorale

PJ Harvey – White Chalk

The Cure – The Forest

The Raincoats - Odyshape

David Bowie – Hunky Dory

Van Morrison – Veedon Fleece

Meet Lucinda Oestreicher on Saturday 9th March from 11am! - It’s free of charge and suitable for all ages.

All artwork featured in our exhibition A Moment in Time is now available to view and purchase HERE

For more information get in touch: info@wealdcontemporary.co.uk

Catherine Knight

Catherine Knight in her Bristol Studio.

In our latest exhibition A Moment In Time Catherine Knight and Lucinda Oestreicher capture natural landscapes distilled in time.

In mid 2023 Catherine Knight was awarded the Mawddach Residency providing her with the opportunity to fully immerse herself in working from the natural landscape of Eryri. The artist found herself transfixed by the sense of time passing from a single window overlooking the Mawddach estuary which seemed to act as a frame containing the vastness of the sky beyond.

We spoke to Catherine in the lead up to her exhibition at Weald Contemporary to find out more…..

Hello Catherine! Could you please introduce yourself and say a little about what you do?

 Catherine: Hi, I am a painter based at BV Studios, Bristol. I paint using oil and gouache, mainly landscapes, window views and recently the full moon. I have been painting for nearly 20 years now since I graduated from my BA and I also teach oil painting workshops.

 (Image: Catherine Knight - 16:55 17th January, 2022, Lake Bled Slovenia.)

I first came across your work when you began your Isolation Windows project, could you explain how that came about and how it has evolved?

Catherine: The Isolation Window project evolved out my need to make work at a point when I had all my time taken from me. My sons were 2 ½ and 5 when the first lockdown started in 2020 and I found myself suddenly thrown into full time childcare. We quickly ditched any attempts at home schooling and just went out for lots of walks and forest adventures. I have often painted window views but at this particular moment in time, our windows became even more poignant.  I put a call out on social media asking people to send me their Isolation Window view and I would then paint them in gouache and post them on Instagram, one a day. I carved out a small amount of time and painted them for a few hours every other evening and I set myself rigid boundaries, for example, they were all exactly the same sized piece of paper and they were titled with the name of the sender and their location. Because my younger son was an early riser, I would post them first thing and would often be the first post people saw when they looked at their phones in the morning. The project grew and reached many corners of the world.

 It was such a strange time for everyone, in different ways, and I don’t think we have processed the effect it has had but this project offered me a bit of an escape and a way of connecting with many people. I felt like I was visiting different rooms, houses and lives in my imagination. Each time a new lockdown was announced, there was always a tiny consolation for me that I could paint more windows.

 (Image: Catherine Knight - 03:28, 20th October, 2021 Totterdown, Bristol)

I then extended this project with my full moon series, this time asking people to send me their photos of the full moon from wherever they are in the world. I am interested in the idea that we are all looking at the same moon from different viewpoints, the same moon that our ancestors looked at. I like the random element of both these projects, that you don’t know who will respond or what they will send and also the sense of connection. If my painting can make a connection with somebody, that makes me happy.

(Image: Catherine Knight, Golden Hour, gouache on paper, framed size 46 x 36 cm, 2023) 

Both Lucinda Oestreicher and yourself studies at Bath Spa University at different times but shared the experience of some incredible tutors including Michael Simpson and Maria Lalic - Can you tell me a bit more about your time there?

Catherine: I did a MA at Bath Spa in 2007-8 and I found it transformational. After a few years out of education, I really appreciated the full-time studio space and access to expert technical advice. Maria Lalic was my main tutor and I felt she gave me a sense of permission to fully explore ideas that I hadn’t quite had the maturity or confidence to develop on my BA. There was a focus on all the choices we make as painters- depth of canvas, whether the edges were painted or not, and on the value of surface preparation. I remember Michael Simpson being a charismatic visiting tutor and he used to guess whose paintings belonged to who as he believed that people in some way looked like their work (he guessed correctly.) He also urged us to keep painting, as it’s a hard road to take but you one that you must persist with.

The work included in your current exhibition A Moment in Time was created during your time on the Mawddach Residency, how was your time there and what drew you to the location?

Catherine: I was drawn to the stunning rural location of Eryri and the chance to have the time and space to fully immerse myself in painting. I initially applied with the intention of painting the full moon, “en plein air”, however due to cloud cover, I never actually saw the moon!  In the end my main preoccupation was with the double-arched windows in the studio overlooking the Mawddach estuary, especially as night fell and the light changed. I often woke up in the night and would go and check at each window to see if the moon was visible, hence all the nocturnal images. The view was constantly changing with the tidal pull with a sand bar appearing and disappearing over the course of the day. I had an overwhelming feeling of being on board a ship with a sense of movement past the window.

(Image: Catherine Knight, Mirror, Oil on linen, 100 x 80cm, 2024)

What are you reading at the moment?

Catherine: I always have a big pile of books next to my bed and often get a bit obsessed with one author and do a deep dive.  Recently, I have been reading all the work of Norwegian author, Karl Ove Knaussgard. A few years ago, it was Japanese author, Haruki Murakami. Currently, I am in love with Irish author, Clare Keegan, who has an incredible economy with words and can say so much in one crushingly good sentence. I also enjoy paintings that say a lot with perhaps very few marks, for example, Lois Dodd, so maybe there is a link there. But, to answer your question, I am currently reading Keegan’s short story collection, Antarctica.

There is a feeling of solidity and balance to your painting, the forms really belong to each other as they naturally occur. Is it the serendipity of finding the right composition / light or moment that drives you to take up residencies like Mawddach?

Catherine: I think residencies take you out of your normal routine and being alone in such a striking location will often lead to seeing things afresh. I am drawn to a sense of balance or calm, for example the sky reflected in the estuary, the evening sun falling on the studio wall, or the drama of when the sky turns dark just before a huge rainstorm. Capturing these fleeting moments is what interests me.

(Catherine Knight, Pause, oil on board, 30.5 x 23 cm)

If you could wake up tomorrow in any time or place in the world and stay for just one day, where and when would it be?

Catherine: I have thought long and hard about this one but since it has been such a cold, damp February here in Bristol, I would love a day in the heat of the New Mexico desert with Georgia O’Keeffe in, say, 1950 when she had moved permanently to Abiquiú. I would love to experience her calm presence and maybe go out walking with her. She is such a unique figure in art history, and I think her early watercolours are some of my favourite artworks. My mum gave me a book of her watercolours for my 16th birthday and I still love looking at them!

What do you have coming up in 2024?

Catherine: I am planning a trip to Munich which is where my grandfather was from and where he met my grandmother when they were both studying zoology in the late 1920’s before having to leave in 1933 due to having a Jewish surname. I have lots of photos that my grandmother took there and I am hoping to retrace some of her steps. I will also visit Murnau where Gabriele Munter lived and worked. A sense of place is very important to my work, and I am hoping that this trip will provide lots of new inspiration.

Did you have a favourite artist or illustrator growing up?

Catherine: It has always been about colour for me so as a teenager growing up in Cornwall, I discovered all the St.Ives artists and particularly loved the intense colours and freedom of Patrick Heron’s work. We saw a huge retrospective of Heron’s work and also a Pierre Bonnard show at the Tate Britain which had a big impact on me.

(Catherine Knight, Still Moment, oil on board, 30.5 x 23 cm)

As you may know, it is essential that we conclude with a studio playlist! Please would you let me have a 5-10 track studio playlist?

Catherine: This is so tricky! In the studio I tend to listen to 6 music because I like the sense of serendipity and also the feeling of connection to the rest of the world. I also listen to soundtracks, for example, The Bear soundtrack is amazing and allows me to hang onto the feeling that a TV series has given me. I love quite melancholy music such as Bonnie Prince Billy and Bill Callahan but if I want to get stuff done in the studio I might put on something a bit more energetic such as:

Nadine Shah- Topless Mother

Self Esteem- Fucking Wizardry

Yeah Yeah Yeahs- Gold Lion

PJ Jarvey- This mess we’re in

Laura Marling- Only the Strong

Sophie Ellis Bexter- Murder on the Dancefloor (little nod to Saltburn here!)

All artwork featured in our exhibition A Moment in Time is now available to view and purchase HERE

Keep an eye out for our interview with Lucinda Oestreicher next week……

Josephine Birch

Portrait of Josephine

In September 2023 Josephine was awarded the Mortitz-Heyman Residency at Borgo Pignano, creating a vast body of works inspiring her new exhibition with Weald Contemporary. In Josephines new collection of drawings, prints and paintings Toscana Heat/Light we are drawn into the heat and light of Tuscany. We caught up with Josephine to find out more about her life and work.

So Josephine - would you start please by introducing yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself and your work.  

 Josephine: I’m an artist and illustrator from Devon with a keen interest in wildlife and storytelling. I teach printmaking and love working with all kinds of people to find a way for them to engage with creative processes. My works usually begin on location and are often finished whilst out and about; these works and walks inspire my studio practise where print making helps expand my ideas and open up narratives and imagination. I work as an illustrator and write and illustrate children's picture books which are always informed by my drawing practise. Drawing is my greatest love.  

Can you tell us about Birch Press and how that came about? 

Josephine: Birch Press houses all my illustration for childrens picture book, novels and chapter books. The work is rooted in all the same sensibilities and values as my drawing, painting and print practise; landscape, the natural world, living and working with animals etc. I really love how books, and picture books in particular, bring artworks into homes, schools, libraries; it is the most direct way for people of any background to access art and in the picturebook form 32 pages of it !  It is often childrens first introduction to great artists. Looking at picture books was my biggest inspiration as a child. 

 I decided to separate my illustration from my painting, drawing and printmaking practise because it made it simpler to promote the different work and organise online portfolios. It’s hard enough as an artist that many industries want to quickly pigeon hole creatives output. There are so many ways in which these kinds of disciplines over-lap and it really just comes down to the intention and application but it frustrates me that Illustrators are sometimes considered lesser artists. A wonderful artist may find the book the best form for their work, or may care that children are the recipients of it. Thats a wonderful thing that shouldn't be overlooked !  

Rising, watercolour 30.5x30.5 Framed

Did you have a favourite work of art or artist when you were growing up and did you always know you were an artist? 

 Josephine: As I mention above my first introduction to artists work was through picture books and I absolutely loved Brian Wildsmith, Shirley Hughes, Mairi Hedderwick and Raymond Briggs. They sparked the first realisations that this could be a job, a way of life. My mum was a dress maker and taught Textiles and my sister is a brilliant painter so I was surrounded by creativity as a child. I also really remember my mum pinning up a copy I’d made at primary school of Monets ‘The Cliffs at Etretat’ and feeling really proud of it. These kinds of little boosts really matter in giving young people the confidence to keep making work, especially in today's state school systems that so poorly support creative thinking. My sister and I were very lucky to have a mum who always emotionally backed our pursuits in the arts. 

When you were hosting the Drawn to Print workshop at Weald Contemporary you had some beautiful and unexpected equipment to work with, do you find yourself continuing to experiment with new ways of mark making or do you have a favoured toolkit you return to time and again? 

Josephine: At Cambridge School of Art we were always taught to keep challenging ourselves with new tools and processes. I think that has stayed with me. For me its all about a balance  between skill and control coupled with innovation and playfulness which allows for some serendipity. This only comes from lots of practise!  I also think the idea sometimes dictates the process – so I let that happen too. 

  I do have a kit for working on location but I swap and change things. I try to take out a limited tool kit most days to take some decisions out of the equation, but it will usually consist of a small watercolour pan set, some tubes of gouche and jars of ink and a full pencil case with charcoals and pencils. 

Portrait of Josephine and Maggie

Can you tell us more about being awarded the Mortitz-Heyman Residency at Borgo Pignano, and creating this incredibly soulful body of works that inspired your solo exhibition with Weald Contemporary? 

Josephine: The Royal Drawing School is a gift that keeps on giving. They so beautifully support their alumni with residency opportunities. It is through these kinds of residencies that I have really learnt how to work in the studio and what to do with these drawings I make on location. The residency at Pignano is quite isolating in ways. You have your own studio apartment on this huge estate and some days I wouldn’t say more than ‘Ciao’ to the farmers all day long. It’s a strange thing that wouldn't be sustainable for too long (at least for me) but it gives you this rare opportunity to not think about anyone or anything other than the work. Everyday is organised solely around that. Each day I would head out early with my sketchbooks and drawing board, with various materials and by the end of each day I’d find a new thing that I wanted to return to for tomorrow, considering when the light might be best, the shadows longest. I have to pace myself as drawing is very exhausting, and I was walking miles in the heat, so I’d tend to allow time to play in my sketchbook as well as time for large focused works. I’d also spend time zooming in and zooming out, focusing on close ups of flora and fauna and then placing these moments into larger works. It requires a certain amount of discipline but once I start it becomes like an obsession; I did not want to leave ! It was so wonderful to have the opportunity to show all of the work together at Weald and reflect on this time. It gave me the opportunity to continue leaning into the experience and make works reflecting my time there, such as the large hanging monoprints. 

You once described the act of drawing to be ‘like a spell’ perhaps beginning a drawing and realising all at once that hours have past by and you are still completely focused on what you are doing. Has this always been the case? and can you tell us about a favourite drawing experience from Borgo Pignano? 

 Josephine: This really began with spending more time drawing on location, which is something we did a lot of on my degree at CSA. I realised that I was sitting still and remaining totally focused (I think we’d call it hyperfocusing nowadays!) Every drawing starts with a period of feeling like I don’t know how to make the right marks, how to organise them and make them communicate what I want them too, but it usually starts to become clear once I’ve dropped into the process more – a bit like meditating or taking a walk, it takes a while to really sink into what you're doing. I think this is why drawing on location is so important for me; coupling the physicality of being outdoors and adding some hurdles puts a boundary between the idea and the work and helps me to turn it into something more than just a straight copy of what’s in front of me. You’re there for extended periods of time, with all the stories in your head, all the emotions of what's going on in your life, and you're responding to the world directly around you. 

 I can remember each drawing I made and where I was when I made it, even the thoughts that were running through my mind. It creates a of kind time capsule of that moment in my mind. The one I really remember was the last drawing I made, ‘View to Borgo Pignano’ when I was exhausted after walking for hours zig zagging my way across the estate. It was boiling hot and I found shade under a little oak tree in the middle of this huge field. All the wildflowers surrounded me, the grasses where singing with grass hoppers and little hard working dung beetles and ants. The clouds were racing across the sky casting shadows over the rolling hills and I began this enormous drawing. I felt I’d bitten off more than I could chew but I was so tired I just relaxed into the moment, focusing on the fact that this was my last afternoon, the last day alone in this amazing place. It became one of my favourite drawings. I think you can see it isn’t as well organised as some of the other large drawings, but I think it has this very full sense of Tuscany, alive and buzzing with so much wildlife and colour and movement.  

Heading Out to Draw, 132x184cm, 126cmx178cm, charcoal, 2023 Unframed

 You have produced some Silent Book which are beautiful, Can you talk more about this? 

Josephine:  I love silent books because they can be read by any person of any language or reading ability. It also gives the reader this sense of creating the story alongside the artist. Our schools push reading levels so hard onto young children despite evidence that this can do more harm than good. We really hamper children in their creativity with all these tests and rules around language, reading and writing. Wordless picture books puts the story telling back into the childs hands and if adults are reading with children it is very quickly obvious who is better at reading pictures! Adults often forget this particular skill !   

  In terms of my practise the wordless/silent book is so akin to all my work- a sense of narrative, of how images work side by side to tell a story. Its always on my mind. If I paint a house with a lit window, the subsequent painting will be of who might be sitting just inside  and then what landscape this house sits in and so on. 

What are you reading at the moment? 

Josephine: I nearly always have non-fiction on the go alongside fiction as I gobble up fiction and am very slow at non-fiction! I’m reading A field guide to getting lost by Rebecca Solnit and I’m rereading Little Women for the millionth time. Very comforting. 

We were discussing your open-source printing press which led us to discover our mutual appreciation of School Prints, can you talk a bit about how you see print evolving and becoming more accessible? 

Josephine: The history and nature of print making is all about ‘the dissemination of information to the masses’. Like picture books, print is a way to make art works available and affordable to a greater amount of people. I teach printmaking at a university and love seeing the thrill of the reveal and the magic of the science of print dawn on new printmakers. Unfortunately, printmaking processes can be expensive to access as we often need specialist equipment so I love exploring and teaching processes that can be done in a sophisticated way by anyone. The tiny Etching press means we can bring printmaking to schools and rural areas. I’m also really interest in how we better support rural arts opportunities. So often funding is based in cities, and when it does come to rural areas its isn’t down the lanes but still centred in local cities. I am much more interested in creating very good opportunities for fewer people rurally than I am in reaching larger audience in urban places that already have these opportunities. Cities have the infrastructure, the funding, the museums and the access routes. How we reach children and communities who have none of this is far more interesting and important to me. Rural communities are so often overlooked and there is a general assumption that living rurally means more wealth; in fact some of the most deprived UK areas are rural! 

Studio playlist time! Please could you list 10 of your favourite studio tracks? It can be what you are listening to at the moment or an ultimate collection, the choice yours… 

Josephine:  I get absolute obsessions and my current is Kate Bollinger and there are constants like Kate Bush and Erykah Badu but the mood has to be exactly right for what I’m working on. My ultimate studio playlist would go something like; 

1. Kate Bollinger – Lady in the Darkest Hour 

1. Goat Rodeo – Attaboy 

1. Talking Heads – This must be the place  

1. Eykah Badu – Appletree 

1. The Fretless – Waiving to Ryan 

1. Johnny Flynn – The Wrote and The writ 

1. Tom Verlaine – Breakin' My Heart 

1. Kate Bush – Bertie 

1. Etta James – I'd rather go blind 

1. Solomon Burke – None of us are free  

 All of the works included in Josephines exhibition will be for sale via out online shop until 9 Feb 2024.