Summer Exhibition
2025
Our Summer 2025 Exhibition features artists from across the United Kingdom, delivering Ceramics, Jewellery, Whisket baskets, stained glass and prints
Contact us directly if you would like to find out more about our artists featured below or purchase one of their pieces.
Denise Brown
Denise Brown is a ceramic artist working from her studio on the family farm in Cambridgeshire. Her work is inspired by rural landscape, often informed by the surrounding Fens with its renowned skies,crops in fields and isolated farm buildings.
Her pieces are open to the viewers interpretation, but with the common theme of space and wild landscape. Her handmade pieces are constructed using thinly rolled slab building techniques, and textures created through mark making with found items picked up around the farm. Discarded broken farm machinery parts found on the paths and from rummaging through the scrap heap in the farmyard, along with brushes from collected dried grasses and stubble from the fields are used to create marks and feed into the narrative of the work.
Pieces are left to fully dry before decorating with her coloured terra sigillata slips. This refined watery slip allows all the textures and marks to be retained. Work is bisque fired in an electric kiln and then further decoration applied using underglazes.
Lewis
Goldwater
Lewis owns a small craft business called Turnham Green Wood in which he makes, sells and teaches skills in greenwood crafts.
Over the last 30 years, a great deal of his time was spent in woodland in the UK, surrounded by trees, learning about how they grow and the ecological communities they support, and practicing the different methods to manage them.
About 8 years ago Lewis learnt about a style of basket made from split hazel (rather than willow) which was known locally as a "whisket" and was a smallholder’s basket, made throughout mid and north Wales.
The “Wisket“ or "Whisket" is a traditional, round-bottomed basket, usually made from split hazel in the Welsh Marches and across Mid Wales. It is similar to the Welsh "Cyntell", consisting of an oval or round hoop/rim formed with bent hazel, split hazel ribs but then woven using long hazel weavers rather than willow.
Robert
Greenhalf
Robert lives in a house with a large wooded garden perched on an ancient cliff-line, overlooking what was once a wide estuary, but where sheep now graze. The wide flat expanse of Romney marsh stretches out to the sea in front whilst behind is the Weald, a patchwork of fields and woods. Robert finds the subjects of his work - invariably birds - in both habitats. For this exhibition he has chosen mainly woodland and farmland birds, with just a few from the coast and marshes
All of Robert’s woodcuts and paintings are inspired by an experience that he has had in nature, using as reference quick sketches and watercolours made on the spot. Back home in the studio, memory also comes into play as he attempts to arrive at a composition as the basis for a print or painting.
Bronwen
Gwillim
Bronwen calls herself a plasticsmith and is interested in waste plastic as a raw resource for making. Much of it is collected from her local beach on the South Pembrokeshire coast where she is drawn to the pieces that show the signs of their journey across the sea - the marks of rocks, bleaching from sunlight and salt. She picks up on each piece’s intrinsic colour, texture and form by using only hand tools to cut, file and scratch its surfaces. The waste dust she creates is, in turn, mixed with bio resins and used to create new composite materials - very little is thrown away. This slow and very considered approach is inspired by the natural processes of wear and weathering and her shapes resemble those found on a beach.
Seeking a more sustainable practice Bronwen’s work has always been led by the materials she finds: originally a painter making her own colour from unorthodox materials (Goldsmiths) she then trained as a jeweller and silversmith (Camberwell) and more recently completed an MA in textiles (Bath Spa). Her mixed media pieces bring all these interests together combining wearable elements on textile or plastic grounds as well as ‘paintings' combining plastic with earth pigments for which she recently won the Canfas award at Craft Festival Wales 2024.
Harriet
Love
Harriet’s designs are primarily inspired by nature, drawn from the world around her, either illustratively, symbolically, or for pattern. She has a large collection of botanical books, which serve as an important source of inspiration. Images from the history of graphics and illustration also inspire her. Harriet incorporates symbols into her work to create personal meaning and connection.
Working with coloured glass she says is a beautiful experience, and the techniques she uses enable her to explore opportunities to play with light and pattern. By applying fired-on paint to its surface, she can manipulate colours and light. The variety of coloured sheets and textures offers endless possibilities. Each design requires Harriet to first cut and shape every glass element. Several layers of glass paint are applied using various painting techniques. At this stage, the glass is fired in a kiln, permanently bonding the paint to the glass. The design pieces are then assembled using lead that is cut to wrap around the glass shapes and carefully soldered at the joints.