Installation of Lay of The Land at The Fermoy Gallery 2024
Tessa Newcomb has been painting the Suffolk landscape for several decades now. Her paintings of people going about their daily activities among the gardens, allotments, ponds and waterways offer a slice of Suffolk country life that quietly celebrates the lives of friends and neighbours - walking their dogs, picking carrots and canoeing among the reeds. Her work is distinctive and highly regarded.
Tessa paints at a scale that is generous to her subject. Smaller, more intimate canvases depict singular subjects like a vase of flowers in a window, or a Neoprene clad figure standing upright on a paddle board. Whatever her subject, they take on a significance, because she has picked each subject out in isolation. The activity within each carefully calibrated composition becomes a moment of distillation.
Tessa Newcomb Woman on the Edge 2024
Larger paintings have lots 'going on', allowing the viewer to focus in on a particular point of interest among several others. Her titles are frequently tangental and reference other media. One of the larger paintings in the exhibition is titled 'Woman on the Edge', and features a marginal figure wandering through the dunes, barely in the picture frame. Tess's titling, while referencing the women in a blue skirt in the image, also echoes the 1988 film by the Spanish Director Pedro Almodóvar, 'Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown' set among a group of loosely connected individual women in Madrid. Like the film, which is a reflection on modern times and the way relationships unpack between the women, the painting forces the viewer to question; Is this a memory or observation?
Paul P. Smith Dogwood 2017
It is the second time we have had the opportunity to show recent canvases by the Norwich-based painter Paul P.Smith. We are grateful for his agreeing to be included in the show. His work is painstakingly observed, slow to realise, and skilfully made. Paul is perhaps best known for his portraiture, although he has become much admired for these extremely detailed studies of plants in the landscape. Many visitors walk past thinking these paintings are photographs, dismissing them as something that has taken no effort other than selecting them from tens of thousands stored on a 'cloud'. But they are only photographic in terms of how the image reads. There are brush strokes but they display little painterly evidence of his process.
In this case he has painted a thicket of a garden shrub, Dogwood, and a stretch of cut grass impregnated with wild flowers. Each painting provides the viewer with a surfeit of visual information. In fact there is so much described in detail that the viewer is challenged to take it all in. The mix is almost too rich, we resist seeing them as 'natural' subjects. The highly wrought images become about the act of looking, rather than as a description of the actual subject - a shrub or a lawn.
Mike Dodd Kett's Oak drawing in nine parts charcoal on paper 2017
Similar in nature to Paul's work is an impressive nine panel drawing in charcoal on paper by Mike Dodd. It too is commonly mistaken is being a black and white photograph. Each panel is a component of the overall image, of the upper branches and leafless canopy of an ancient oak tree in Hethersett, known as Kett's Oak.
Kett’s Oak is named after Robert and William Kett of Wymondham, who assembled a group of men near the tree, before marching on Norwich 1549. Their grievance was to do with the act of enclosure. The act saw common land removed from circulation and assimilated into private ownership by the land owners, who then charged rent for access to the grazing rights. The increased cost of grazing animals added to pressure on the already rising cost of living at the time.
Enclosure hedges were ‘thrown down’ by the group's followers, and this was regarded as an offence against the new 'owners'. The protest was suppressed and several rebels, including Robert and William Kett were convicted and hung to deter any further challenges. Nine of the rebels were hung at Kett's Oak. The drawing is a reminder to present day audiences about this significant moment in the appropriation of common land, as well as a technical achievement, as the tonal consistency is remarkable. Each panel took several weeks to complete.
Installation at the Fermoy Gallery by Will Cutts
The landscape paintings to the right of Mike's drawings are by Will Cutts. These small-scale canvases and paintings on board are grouped together for this exhibition, however, they were not intended to be shown in this arrangement by the artist. Each painting has been completed meticulously over many months or occasionally after several years. Two are of the same view, at different times of year. Will has an approach that is based upon quick observation in the landscape, 'en plein air'. However, he works up each painting back in the studio finding the point of interest in the underlying patterns and perspectival games that are revealed during his process.
Will makes the frames for his paintings too. These are beautifully designed and handmade in response to the subject they surround. For this installation we hung them in close relation to each other, to make apparent the shapes the frames make as a group and the consistent quality of Will's landscapes. There is no doubt that his intricate, and beautifully observed paintings depicting the byways of Norfolk and Suffolk focus in on what makes these backwoods areas so delightful to us. But these views of winding lanes are treated in a modern way, with no sentiment or reference to earlier 'schools of' artists.
Installation in the Fermoy Gallery by Helen Derbyshire 2024
We have included four embroidered textile works by Helen Derbyshire in the exhibition. Two of the larger framed works are studies of trees and scrub in the Waveney Valley, that travels along the Norfolk and Suffolk border. These seductive images are constructed in several ways. Some start with either a sketch or using a simple photographic or under-painted tonal schematic using interlining. Into this Helen uses thread to stitch in the vegetation, sometimes on a machine, at other times by hand, building up a textured image that relies on thread transforming into overgrown thickets, water reflecting a winter sky or a single sombre tree.
Others are less pictorial and operate like a botanist's study of a cross-section of a plant. These studies highlight individual plants, often considered weeds, found locally to where she lives, like Cow Parsley, or Ragged Robin. She leaves tell-tale loose threads beneath the embroidery to tip off the viewer on her choice of media.
Installation by Nessie Stonebridge 2024
On the far wall of the Fermoy Gallery are several large drawings, two sets of sculptural candlesticks and one large highly coloured painting on canvas and a smaller, more muted one on board by Nessie Stonebridge. Nessie has been making her complex drawings of birds for a while using a combination of charcoal and graphite. Each drawing is sparsely laid out with skirmishes of incident. In this case birds engaged in territorial defence or attack, diving at each other. These could be life or death struggles, one could be the aggressor, the other its prey.
Her paintings take a different approach, like her drawings they explode with energy, but take on a more historic significance... possibly because they're paintings? The larger more colourful painting in the centre of the wall, features a bird of prey descending, like christ on an altarpiece.
Lay of the Land has closed now. Most of the work exhibited is available to view online by clicking through to the exhibiton page here.
About the author
Paul Barratt
Paul Barratt started working in contemporary art galleries in 1989, having graduated in Fine Art from Goldmsith’s, London University. He initially worked at Anthony d’Offay Gallery, one of the contemporary art dealers, who dominated the London art market in the 80s and 90s. He was approached by the Lisson Gallery to be gallery manager for the influential art dealer Nicholas Logsdail. This was followed by a short period in New York at Gladstone Gallery, to work for visionary art dealer Barbara Gladstone, working with the artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney.
On his return to London, Paul secured a place on the postgraduate curatorial course at the Royal College of Art, to complete an MA. After graduation in 2001, he worked as an independent curator on several projects in Oslo, London, Brighton and Basel, before joining Paul Vater at his design agency Sugarfree in 2004. He has worked with Paul ever since.
