Sean Scully and East to East at Houghton Hall

We are thankful to Dominic Castle and his team at Norfolk Magazine for covering the build up to the opening of Sean Scully - smaller than the sky and our  exhibition "East to East" which opens at te same time in the stable block. The March edition gave an introduction to some of the artists and makers showing with us for the first time, namely Ella Porter and Tassie Russell.

More recently, the April issue has dropped onto doorsteps - see p45 giving an outline of the thinking behind our exhibition. Like Sean Scully, exhibitors taking part in East to East share an aesthetic that is free of visual noise. Most of the artists and makers follow in the tradition of creating their work by hand, using techniques that require skill in the manual manipulation of material. There is a conceptual precision running through all their work, with many working in series, producing variants on an initial idea. This is in line with Sean Scully’s long held belief that his work reveals its qualities slowly, and with material integrity.

East to East proposes that there is a bridge between art from the east and what is happening here, now in East Anglia. We hope that it will help lay to rest assumptions about the UK being a more isolated place post Brexit, resistant to cultural exchange. Historically, this was not the case. England’s maritime trade routes were opened up throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as western contact with China introduced new styles in painting, decor, ceramics, and garden and landscape design, which flourished in the eighteenth century. Europe’s infatuation with all things Japanese only took hold in the latter half of the nineteenth century upon the reopening of Japan to diplomacy and trade in 1853.