ABOUT US: C&C show contemporary and applied art from East Anglia

Contemporary and Country (C&C) present contemporary and applied art by artists and makers from East Anglia.

C&C's pop-up exhibitions frequently forego the art gallery setting, opting for architecturally interesting spaces that encourage visitors to engage with art.

The Viewing Room

To better support East Anglian creatives C&C have opened a viewing room where we hold small-scale solo or two person exhibitions, showing new work.

The viewing room is open from Wednesday to Friday 11am to 4pm and Saturday from 11am to 2pm, at Woolmarket House, 6 St Nicholas Street, King's Lynn, Norfolk PE30 1LY.

Outside these hours entry can be arranged by appointment in advance. If you book ahead we will try to accommodate your preferred time. It is a viewing room and not a gallery, so we can only take groups of about six or seven people.

For many East Anglian artists and makers the landscape is frequently the source of their inspiration.

The artists and makers C&C work with live and work throughout the east of England. Others live elsewhere, in cities like London, and spend time here, maintaining their connection with their home town, or working with an aspect of the landscape that is particular to the east coast. Through their creative process, artists and makers celebrate their rural surroundings bringing about a closer understanding of the land, the coastal areas, and the way of life here.

C&C display original work in group and solo exhibitions that open up opportunities for artists and makers.

Creatives have access to more generous workshop and studio space in the east. The region's 'homegrown' talent has gathered in particular locations throughout East Anglia, and they have attracted others from more metropolitan centres, like London or Leicester and Nottingham.

While this upturn in creative activity by artists and makers among rural communities represents a welcome development, there are still relatively few spaces to show the results of their labour locally.

The dearth of suitable display space is one of several issues that concern creatives in rural locations. C&C address the scarcity of viable display space by finding unusual buildings, both gallery and non-gallery settings to hold pop-up group and solo exhibitions.

These feature original work configured around themes or a shared methodology, that attract local audiences as well as visitors from London, Cambridge, Leicester and Nottingham. C&C's exhibition programme appeals to an informed, art savvy audience, driving attention toward contributing creatives, brokering sales and facilitating a greater understanding of the work on display.

The existing network of art galleries and museums and how they operate within the eastern region.

East Anglia's network of galleries and museums are a valuable resource for creatives, however their remits limit the scope of the art they are able to programme.

Public sector:

The east of England is fragmented by distance and has relatively few urban areas, with the exception of Norwich and  Colchester. These locations have a handful of publicly funded galleries and museums that have limited contemporary programmes.

These publicly funded organisations have worked hard to maintain their profiles and encourage engagement with local audiences. Yet, despite their relative success in addressing audience development and investing in visitor interests, their funding streams have been dramatically reduced over the last decade and a half.

What little funding there is made available by government, has been made dependent upon also raising funding from private patronage. This model brings with it predictable problems for the institutions themselves. These are largely to do with the mechanics of fundraising in the private sector, which tends to be get directed toward building projects rather than investing in staff or research. This funding model also impacts upon the creatives. Implicit in the generous act of donation is the expectation that artists should be following an agenda set by those patrons and the tastes they express through their collecting activities. These often well-meaning patrons have their limits in what they will and won't fund. These are frequently at odds with the ideas artists and makers pursue in their work, which results in an artificial holding back of artistic development.

Private sector:

And commercial galleries based particularly along the North Norfolk and Suffolk coasts, tend to embrace the tourist market. While catering to this more transitory audience makes commercial sense for them, the knock on effect is their exhibition season is restricted to the summer, with perhaps a bit of a 'selling show' before Christmas. They tend to show tried and tested work. Often these are secondary market pieces, none of which really makes sense for creatives, who are making new work and who run their production year round making new work.

This is just a brief outline of some of the problems and the limitations caused by a depleated infrastructure creatives find themselves having to cope with. The shortcomings of public and private sector galleries have been well-documented, and have had to be navigated by creatives for some time.

C&C cannot castigate either the public or the private sector approaches. Both have responded to the limitations of the market outside of our major cities, which has come about in a vaccum left by a lack of a coherent visual arts strategy, inadequate funding and almost no visual arts provision in education, which is consistant with that at national level.

Thankfully, the strategic restrictions introduced at government level have motivated some individuals, (including C&C) to counter this movement to demote our rich cultural output and limit its influence. There are several organisations and artist groups as well as more adventurous individuals based in the region who present high quality art and craft made here to audiences who would otherwise be prevented from engaging with what they are so clearly seeking.

C&C operate by moving around the region and encouraging engagement from new audiences.

C&C are not alone in trying different models to provide a more reliable platform for artists and makers to get their work seen and understood, but we are probably one of the more responsive organisations to the needs of artists and makers themselves. As we have developed we have encouraged a broader audience of informed art collectors from larger cities, and an informal grouping of buyers based locally to where we hold our pop-ups, interested in creative work. We have attracted new, younger collectors who want to live with original art and handmade objects rather than buy the low cost, shiny, mass-market 'wall art', that has been designed and aimed for the short-term to decorate modern British homes.

C&C raise audience expectations, by moving around the region, showing high quality work produced here and displaying as best we can to its advantage, by not being teathered to a single location.

To enable better representation C&C's projects are tailored to the way artists and makers operate today, providing a curated context to show their work, connecting with a diverse audience through real life displays or online.

You may have already visited a C&C pop-up exhibition without realising it...

C&C's pop-up exhibitions have been held at Stapleford Granary, Cambridge, The Crypt Gallery, Norwich, The Fermoy Gallery and Shakespeare Barn at St. George's Guildhall, King's Lynn, Houghton Hall Stables, in West Norfolk, at BallroomArts, Aldeburgh, on the Suffolk coast, The Granary (Jarrolds), in Norwich, and at Creake Abbey near Burnham Market on the North Norfolk coast. For each of these installations the work was chosen to suit the circumstances of the built environment of each venue. Whether that was a purpose built beachside art gallery, the top floor loft-space in a converted warehouse store, or an ancient chalk and flint barn, visitors were attracted by the experience and then stayed for the art.

C&C's exhibitions at the Stables Houghton Hall took place between 2017 and 2023. These were large group exhibitions featuring between 30 to 45 artists and makers with an East Anglian connection that were predicated upon a common theme. They were configured to support the solo exhibitions by acclaimed international artists: Richard Long, Henry Moore, Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, Tony Cragg, Ernst Gamperl, John Virtue, and Sean Scully.