GATEPOST

Rarely do we get to Great Yarmouth these days. For Paul and me this weekend's vist was a timely reminder that the artists and art organisations who have been established in Yarmouth for many decades now, 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.

Norfolk-based portrait artist Rosie Phillips was invited back to feature on a recent episode of Sky Portrait Artist of the Year 2024.

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 dropped into 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.

Artist Peter Wylie, who has shown his meticulous paintings and prints of the Suffolk coast and of modernist architecture in C&C exhibitions over the past few years, has researched, written and published a new book about a little-known fishing and fashion sub-culture titled The Dockside Dandies.

I attended the public launch of the Roger Ackling exhibition Sunlight, at the Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery on Friday. Ackling is known among artists as 'the guy who burnt stuff' using the power of the sun. This glib description underserves his rich and complex lexicon of mark making developed during a fifty-year career. Ackling's work is at once all encompassing in its harnessing of an element, and led by that process, as well as beautifully detailed and humane in its conceptual approach.

The exhibition has been long in the planning and includes in excess of 150 individual works by 'the artist's artist', poet and teacher, long-term resident of North Norfolk, Roger Ackling (1947 – 2014).

The exhibition Double Take has now closed at The Crypt Gallery, but for those who missed it, you can see our record of the exhibition using the QR code.

Double Take opened on Friday 10 May and we have already welcomed over 400 visitors to view work by James Evans, Susan Gunn and Tassie Russell.

Our exhibition Double Take opens on Friday 10  May at The Crypt Gallery, Norwich. It includes work by three artists with strong bonds to Suffolk and Norfolk, including sculptor, James Evans; painter, Susan Gunn; and painter, printmaker, and photographer Tassie Russell. The quality of their work draws the viewer in, encouraging us to look closer and overturn our assumptions, exploring the familiar as locations for ambiguity.

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

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.

Rosie Phillips began her residency at Norwich School on January 10th. She has welcomed pupils, teachers, school staff, caretakers to the studio and during this last week from February (5th to the 7th), Rosie has welcomed forty visitors, from the school's student groups like a creative writing class (Writer's Bloc), to visiting Norwich-based artists and collectors at a series of open days. She has talked about her work, what inspires her, how she selects her sitters, her interest in their background stories, and she has answered their questions to the best of her ability.

Rosie Phillips' residency at Norwich School comes to its fruition next week. Having been in situ at The Crypt Gallery since January 10th, Rosie is now completing a number of preliminary working drawings to add to her impressive collection of recent paintings, that will be shown during her exhibition Close, opening on Saturday 10th February and running for just five days until Thursday 15th.

To kick off our activities for 2024 we're delighted to announce a new Norwich-based artist residency at Norwich School. We have been working in collaboration with Andy Campbell at Norwich School and to initiate the residency at the Crypt Gallery for portrait artist Rosie Phillips.

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.

On the first frosty day this autumn we visited The Wanderer, a group exhibition inspired by the Anglo-Saxon elegy of the same name at The Gallery, @butleymillsstudios, before it closes on the 6th December.

For C&C’s winter collection 2023 we have put together a seasonal selection of contemporary art and handmade craft made by the East Anglia’s finest artists and makers. Selected with your needs in mind in the quest to source a matchless gift for someone special.

We are delighted to have welcomed visitors to see the work of artists from Norfolk and Suffolk at the Fermoy Gallery and Shakespeare Barn. Having opened on September 9 we have averaged just short of 70 visitors a day.

More than forty pupils from King’s Oak Primary School, King's Lynn came to visit our current exhibition Heads & Tails with their teachers.

Rosie Phillips is a self-taught painter. Creativity was always a part of her childhood, but it wasn’t until she completed A-Levels in 2019 that she began practicing art professionally, taking on commissioned work and exhibiting locally.

Roger Hardy is a sculptor based in Suffolk. His sculpture is figurative, made from reclaimed wood, metal and with pigment additions, configured to create the human form.

A FREE TOUR WITH AN EXHIBITION ATTACHED!

Join King’s Lynn Town Guides to discover hidden courtyards and alleyways and hear about the fascinating 900-year history of what was once one of England’s wealthiest towns. Then come and meet ome of the artists in our exhibition "Heads & Tails"

PLACES ARE LIMITED TO BOOK YOUR PLACE ASAP

C&C's latest exhibition Heads and Tails is now open in the Shakespeare Barn and Fermoy Gallery, King's Lynn. It brings together a group of 10 artists who have been working with the many narratives that explore the interspecies bonds formed between people and animals.

 

Heads and Tails is a group exhibition of ten artists exploring the interspecies bonds formed between people and animals and how they look within the home, the workplace or in the wild. The artists propose various disciplines that engage with human as well as animal behaviour and how that is represented in art now. Heads and Tails opens Saturday 9 September, and runs until Saturday 28th October 2023. It will be open Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 11am to 4pm. ENTRY IS FREE at the Fermoy Gallery and Shakespeare Barn, St. George's Guildhall, 29 King Street, King's Lynn, PE30 1HA.

Our exhibition "East to East" is open every Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday until October 1. We recently had an article published in KL Magazine which had a focus on on those artists and makers based in the Fenlands of East Anglia.

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.

Drawing upon the unique landscape of Stiffkey Salt Marshes; this collection of works reflect on a sense of this special place through memories of coastal walks and observations of the landscape shifting and changing through seasons.

We set off this past Thursday for the launch of the first part of an exhibition of street art organised by West Suffolk cultural organisations, who have joined forces to host Urban Frame: Mutiny in Colour.

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.

And we're off...

We have begun installation in the Stables at Houghton Hall. Here are a few glimpses of the inspiring new work included in the exhibition East to East, opening on Sunday 23 April.

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.

Nessie Stonebridge's paintings depict the explosive energy of rural Norfolk's avian splendor, where her studio is based. A flash of light, feathers, beaks; a vortex of vitality, blood, life and death!

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.

Like many of us at this time of year Simon Carter loves to walk. His routes ofter take him to the marshes of  his native Essex. Unlike us however, he makes this pilgrimage all year round and always with a sketch book in hand.

Ella Porter has a multidisciplinary practice, which explores interchangeable material languages and processes between ceramics print and painting.

We have witnessed fantastic night skies like this recently - this one painted by Norfolk-based artist, Claire Cansick. Work like this reminds us of the natural beauty surrounding us but also represents the opportunity to lift our gaze to see beyond the everyday. Can we really live the dream?

Compendia is a new, comprehensive guide to independent businesses and organisations,that make Norwich and Norfolk so unique and such a great location to live. It includes Contemporary and Country. The guide features the best places to find culture, art, eat, drink, go shopping, for sleep and healing in Norwich and Norfolk.

Our winter 2022-23 programme begins with a selection of handmade pieces made by makers that complement each other and have been designed specifically for a domestic setting. All items are  original works, by well-established makers and available for sale. Perfect timing for those looking for a one-of-kind Christmas gift.

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.

For C&C's summer exhibition Avant Gardeners, we have produced our first limited edition art posters of original paintings by Kate Giles and Linda Jamieson that celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Houghton Hall Estate. We're raising funds for two extremely worthwhile projects that encompass art and the national pastime, gardening.

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.

We are counting down the final days of the River's Edge exhibition before we move on, and we still have wonderfully conceived prints of East Anglian landscapes, framed and mounted in preparation for framing.

This is week two of C&C's current exhibition River's Edge at BallroomArts, (Formerly known as The Peter Pears Gallery) - at 152A High Street Aldeburgh. Situated just back from the beach and off the main high street.

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.

A huge thank you to Ben of Fishers Gin and his team at @fishersgin and Claire and her team at Aldeburgh Outside Catering who made our private view @ballroomartsaldeburgh last night go so well, providing refreshing smoked gin cocktails and delicious canapés. Our River's Edge pop-up exhibition runs for the first two weeks of the Aldeburgh Festival @brittenpearsarts in Snape and throughout the Suffolk coast. The Courtyard Gallery at BallroomArts contains art and handmade items by artists and makers from across East Anglia, all have a connection to the East Anglian landscape.

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.

Making a day out rediscovering the wonders of the main house after being closed for two years due to COVID restrictions gives visitors an opportunity to fall in love with the art inside the house and outside in the gardens and parkland again.

A big thank you to the team at KL Magazine for their article covering the special 300th anniversary year at Houghton Hall. This coincided with the May 1st opening of our exhibition in the stables,"Avant Gardeners" as well as our collaboration with Jarrold Norwich, setting up The Granary Gallery, Pop-Up exhibition on the second floor at The Granary in Bedford Street, Norwich.

Coinciding with the first two weeks of Aldeburgh Festival this year, is an exhibition of new paintings by Kate Giles, with sculpture by Jack Wheeler, Beth Groom and the late Emily Mayer. They are joined by artists and makers who have a strong connection to East Anglia and its coastal landscape.
 
BallroomArts; The Ballroom / Courtyard Gallery, Aldeburgh, Suffolk: 7 to 19 June 2022

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.

We are looking forward to welcoming you to C&C's Open Weekend of our pop-up event on the second floor Granary Gallery, The Granary, Bedford Street, Norwich this weekend, from Friday 8 to Sunday 10 April (10.30am to 4.30pm). The artists and makers in our spring installation "It's All Happening Here" have been selected for a capsule collection:

Norwich-based artist Polly Cruse's work encompasses photography and sculpture within the tradition of Still Life. She focusses on the relationships between the intangible and the material aspects of the everyday. We are showing her work in several of our pop-up exhibitions this year, including at The Granary Gallery from April 1

We are delighted to be establishing a new space for showing art and the handmade at The Granary Gallery, Bedford Street, Norwich on 1 April.  The new pop-up art gallery has been established in partnership with Jarrold, Norwich's flagship department store.

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.

We visited Carolyn Brookes-Davies recently in her studio in North Norfolk. Carolyn combines recycled paper, seashell, wood and metal to explore and create sculptural constructions of manipulated natural forms, constructing three dimensional objects by conscious sourcing, gathering, collecting and assembling her material.

Our next exhibition Avant Gardeners will be in the Stables at Houghton Hall, from 1 May until 25 September 2022. It will celebrate the horticultural and cultivated landscape behind and beyond the garden wall.

Great Yarmouth artists John Kiki, Katarzyna Coleman, Brüer Tidman and sculptor Bridget Heritz have featured in several exibitions by Contemporary and Country during the last couple of years. This year we will include several paintings of tropical landscapes by painter Peter Rudolfo for the first time.

Stephen Murfitt has compiled a new publication on the Japanese ceramic firing technique - Raku.

'The opportunity to put together this book for the Crowood Press became a welcome project and a creative focus away from the relentless depressing news on Covid during the lockdowns.'

C&C will be including Cambridgeshire-based Stephen Murfitt's recent Raku fired pots in our pop-up exhibitions for the first time this year.

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.

Art can be defined as a“diverse range of human activities in creating visual, auditory or performing artefacts, expressing the author's imaginative or technical skill, intended to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional power.” With this in mind, why is photography still not seen as art by some?

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.

 

We recently attended the opening of an exhibition featuring more than fifty paintings of John Kiki's series of Infanta Paintings. The installation confirms Kiki's status as one of the country's great colourists. The brilliant natural light of the new Yare Gallery show this dazzling variety of canvases based on a common theme to their best advantage. Contemporary and Country are exhibiting a number of John Kiki's small-scale paintings consigned from a private collection in our pop-up exhibition in the Stables Houghton Hall until September 26. The Yare Gallery exhibition is on until November 5.

Autumn is upon us and I am listening to Marianne Faithfull and Warren Ellis' new album of orchestrated spoken poetry called "She Walks in Beauty" with sleeve and promo imagery provided by Norwich-based pop artist Colin Self. We are currently showing Colin's series of limited edition prints including some that feature on the album in our current pop-up exhibition at Houghton Hall.