Posts by Paul Barratt

The Castle Museum and Art Gallery's capsule retrospective exhibition titled One Self, by the artist Colin Self has been long awaited. Although he has been generous enough to show selections of his original drawings, collages and prints with us at C&C in our Pop-Up exhibitions, and he has contributed individual works regularly to international shows about Pop Art, Colin rarely shows his work at scale in museums. Having been fully immersed in the art scene in London showing his work at influential galleries during the 60s, he stood back from the art world in the middle of the 1970s, and his last museum exhibition was seventeen years ago at Pallant House, Sussex.

En route to delivering a new sculpture into a collector based in Northumberland in late November, Paul and I stopped off for a few days north of the border in Edinburgh to visit friends and to catch some of the exhibitions in the city's national museums.

Rarely do we get to Great Yarmouth these days. For Paul and me this weekend's visit was a timely reminder that the artists and art organisations who have been established in Yarmouth for many years, are among the most informed and powerful advocates for the town and that the art scene is among the most socially engaged in East Anglia.

As we begin the last four days of Lay of The Land exhibition it is a good moment to look at the artists and makers who have captured the attention of visitors to the exhibition through their work on paper, embroidery, as well as paint on canvas or board.

The artists are: Tessa Newcomb, Paul P. Smith, Mike Dodd, Helen Derbyshire, Will Cutts, and Nessie Stonebridge. All of whom use tried and tested techniques in their chosen medium to produce their work, and yet they each achieve unconventional results.

It's the end of week two for our current exhibition Lay of the Land at the Fermoy Gallery and Shakespeare Barn, St George's Guildhall, King's Lynn and we have been welcoming visitors from London, Cambridge, and just a few stops down the line, from Ely. Many are coming to see work by specific artists, others are attracted by the scope of the subject matter - East Anglian landscape.

The show includes some well-known as well as some less experienced landscape painters who treat the coastal reaches of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex as an uplifting experience, and not as flat and uneventful as East Anglia's reputation suggests! Each represents their own vision of how distinctive individual components of the coast can be, as the shore unfolds mile by mile.

One of the key components for C&C’s latest exhibition Lay of the Land in King's Lynn and the reason so many visitors have praised the quality of the work in the exhibition is the significant contribution made by artists and makers who work in ceramics. Thanks to artists like James Evans, Kathryn Hearn, and Nessie Stonebridge the exhibition marks the degree to which applied and contemporary art practice have transgressed during the last twenty-five years, confounding conventions for the medium, and opening up new possibilities for landscape as a genre.

We were in and around Halesworth in Suffolk this week and decided to drop in and see an exhibition at The Halesworth Gallery. Fliss Cary and Tracee Findlater have collaborated on their publication Something Grim. Fliss Cary’s black and white artwork, sits seamlessly alongside Tracee Findlater’s poetic text. The book provides the backbone for their part of what is actually a small group exhibition that includes work by Jack Crampton, and Sally Erb.

Paul and I visited the Cromer Artspace on Monday to catch the last day of The Sands of Time: A response to 200 years of coastal change. An exhibition by artist Jayne Ivimey and environmental scientist Andrew Watkinson. We were so pleased we did! It was such a coherent beautifully presented display.

Issam Kourbaj is a Cambridge-based artist originally from Syria, taking an uncompromising look at his country of origin, following its years of conflict. The subject of the exhibition is the current social and political distress in Syria, as its population endures ongoing oppression from a despotic regime.

We visited The Courtauld Institute on a recent trip to London to see The Charcoal Heads exhibition by Frank Auerbach, at Somerset House.

C&C's new exhibition is opening today! Unfurl explores botanical beauty by eight artists and makers featuring new and recent work by:

Claire Coles, Carolyn Brookes-Davies, Helen Derbyshire, Mark Edwards, Elizabeth Merriman, Tim Plunkett, Ella Porter and Layne Rowe.

Paul and I attended a discussion event on Saturday 9 December, held at East Gallery, Norwich. It was a discourse about the legacy and archive of EASTinternational, a series of annual contemporary art exhibitions held throughout Norwich Art School during the summer recess. These were large, multi-generation exhibitions, that took place over nearly two decades and produced much of the documentation and art related ephemera, which has formed the basis of the current exhibition:

EASTinternational: Unpacking the Archive

2 December 2023 – 3 February 2024 | East Gallery

Exhibition curated by Candice Allison with Charlie Denning

Discourse curated by writer and critic Jonathan P. Watts

EASTinternational: Unpacking the Archive is the first in a series of exhibitions and research events aimed at reflecting on the legacies, networks, and impact of the EASTinternational exhibitions. The exhibition presents the archive as a living site of knowledge production.

Recumbence is a solo exhibition of sculpture by Suffolk based sculptor Laurence Edwards, centred upon his studies for a single male  figure, in bronze, laying horizontally, his head slightly raised, hanging to one side, as if examining his own predicament. Because of the subject and its context in a crypt, within the Cathedral Close of Norwich Cathedral, we read the figure as Christ, laid out flat, entombed, lifeless. A powerful subject.

Sean Scully's solo exhibition of sculpture and painting Smaller Than The Sky is dispersed throughout the house and grounds of Houghton Hall, from 23 Apil to 29 October. It is the latest in Houghton Hall's series of world-class exhibitions by international contemporary sculptors.

We were in Cambridge last week and got to see the Lucie Rie exhibition at Kettle's Yard House and Gallery, Cambridge. The exhibition is free and if you are interested in mid-century ceramics, the assembled work is breathtaking. It opened 4 March, and runs until 25 June, 2023.

Amanda Edgcombe's current exhibition Loop presents new carborundum prints and gesso paintings where a closer relationship between painting and print making has been developed.

It is a rare moment for art audiences in the UK as internationally acclaimed artist Sean Scully opens a solo exhibition of his sculpture and paintings, displayed throughout the house and grounds of Houghton Hall, Norfolk. Scully has exhibited internationally, during a long career. Smaller Than The Sky will be one of the visual art events of the year in East Anglia.

Liz McGowan is an artist who works with natural and found materials, creating responses to particular environments through installation, sculpture, drawing and conversation. She exhibits her work nationally and carries out creative interventions in the environment at locations throughout Norfolk.

Victoria Fenn is a sculptor exploring memories and landscape motivated by her personal connection to the Cambridgeshire Fens, where she grew up on the family farm.

It is not without irony that the exhibition BIG WOMEN, including more than twenty leading women artists, is taking place at Firstsite, Colchester in the heart of Essex, the home of the misogynistic Essex joke.

Linda Jamieson is a painter whose work has been closely associated with the North Norfolk coastal landscape for a while now. It is where she spends much of her time. For the last two years her work has moved away from observation and memory, toward a more imaginative use of landscape as a barometer of her own state of mind.

After a career teaching in universities in the UK and Australia, Tassie Russell now works in her painting and printmaking studio on the Suffolk coast.

As the Dahlias tip over into each other, drawn down with the weight of their heads, and we de-install Andrew Jones's wonderful kinetic sculptures in the walled garden, we are thankful to have reached the end of the summer season at Houghton Hall Stables.

'A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstitching has been naught.'

William Butler Yeats

Environmental artist Liz McGowan asks questions of us about how we may relate to our surroundings, in her current exhibition at Stapleford Granary, Cambridge.

Four years ago the sculptor and master wood turner, Ernst Gamperl, took delivery of a gift from the Marquess and Marchioness of Cholmondeley. It was an oak tree, recently felled, thought to be one of the trees already present when the Houghton Hall Estate was first established three hundred years ago, in 1722 by Sir Robert Walpole.

We have put the final touches to our summer installation at The Granary Gallery this week. The seasonal refresh brings with it a selection of established artists based on the north coast to the second phase of the exhibition and several new artists we have introduced, showing with us for the first time. Alongside them are new examples of work from one or two of the artists we opened with for this ongoing project on the second floor of The Granary store.

Jack Wheeler and Beth Groom are sculptors who met at Norwich Art School (NUA) while they were still undergraduates. The pair have since carved out their separate careers. Jack as a Carpenter specialising in bespoke carpentry, hand-built timber buildings and Beth as an Art Therapist working in a care facility for people with learning difficulties, Along side these activities they work together as artists on their creative projects.

We had hoped to be presenting the sculptor and taxidermist Emily Mayer's beautifull bird sculptures in Suffolk, while she was in recovery from cancer. Sadly as the deadline for the exhibition approached we received the news that Emily's cancer had returned and just a few weeks later that she had died on 1st April 2022.

We would like to thank the artist, John Locker, her husband for allowing us to show Emily's work in the exhibition and for access to her archive, to display a small selection of her beautiful bird sculptures.

C&C's latest pop-up exhibition at BallroomArts, Aldeburgh, Suffolk, is opening Tuesday 7 June at 10am, taking place in both gallery spaces. The Courtyard Gallery, at ground level contains a group exhibition comprising more than twenty artists who have a strong connection with the Suffolk coast and the landscape of East Anglia.The first floor ballroom houses bird sculptures by the late Emily Mayer, new sculpture by Jack Wheeler and Beth Groom.

This summer C&C will be fundraising for the Vasseur BALTIC Artists'Award launched last week at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, named after Isabel Vasseur (1942-2021). Isabel was a pioneering commissioner and supporter of artists from the UK and internationally. The award for international artists has sbeen created in recognition of her long association in promoting international art commissions and her connections with East Anglia the North East and her work with the BALTIC as a trustee.

The Art of Roller Skating is an exhibition by artist and documentary photographer Debby Besford, celebrating the artistic roller skating heritage of Great Yarmouth.

The exhibition has been organised and hosted by Original Projects, held at PRIMEYARC, Market Gates, Great Yarmouth, from 5 March  to 1 May 2022. The exhibition also incorporates stories, artefacts and memorabilia invited from the community, to activate relationships, events and activities throughout the show.

In December 2021, before the spectre of another Christmas lockdown raised its potential, Paul and I managed to follow through on a number of long overdue studio visits. Among these was a quick visit to the North Norfolk coast to see a capsual collection of artist Elizabeth Merriman's recent pastel drawings of garden flowers adorning the ground floor of a clifftop cottage overlooking the North Sea.

In preparation for our summer programme of events for 2022 we took the opportunity to visit Steven James Will and Annie Turner during their pre-Christmas open studio event in late November. While both work in ceramics and conveniently share a building, they could not be more different from one another in terms of outcome.

On a warm October evening we went to the first public showing of 528Hz Love Frequency a series of immersive light installations by Chris Levine at Houghton Hall.

Linda Jamieson has used the last eighteen months to create a new body of work, the subject of an all too brief pop-up exhibition in London recently.

Our third visit to a gallery since the perculiarly anticlimactic easing of national lockdown was to the Castle Museum Norwich, to view the exhibition A Passion for Landscape Rediscovering John Crome curated by Giorgia Bottinelli.