AUTUMN GROUP SHOW

FREYJA LEE
Freyja Lee is an artist and mother creating her work within and around the chaos of family life from her studio at her home in the hills of North Wales.

With a background in drawing and printmaking Freyja has specialised in ceramic slipware serving as functional objects, heirloom pieces, and vessels for storytelling.

Taking inspiration from her inner and surrounding landscape, dreams, poetry, myth, and her experience of being a woman and mother.

“Humans have always told stories on pots, I’m excited to continue that tradition, exploring my own myth on functional and timeless objects.”

KAREN FOSS
Since leaving art college Karen has always worked in the field of non-objective art exploring line, repetition, and colour in painting, drawing and sculpture.

The works in this exhibition were developed from a series of paintings started in 2022 involving straight lines and strong colour, familiar to her practice. Curves began to be introduced into the paintings and this soon led to the inclusion of circles and ellipses. Some of these paintings, the Unashamedly Beautiful series, took on a very colourful approach reflecting joy and hope. Meanwhile, contemporaneous drawings were much quieter, inviting the viewer to peaceful contemplation.

MARTHA HOLMES
Martha Holmes captures the essence of the Cornish coastline through abstract studies of colour and light. Her work is emotively charged by a deep connection to the ocean and its ever-changing influence on the landscape which she paints. Inspired by the Cornish masters – Heron, Hepworth, Nicholson, Scott – Martha’s works in oil immerse the viewer in an emotional dialect, born from a deep-rooted connection to the land where she grew up. Abstract in form, often with large flat areas of colour, Martha’s work captures a raw and honest sense of the landscape – her own experience communicated through colour and expressive mark-making.

More recently, Martha’s work has shifted to exploring the hybrid between the exterior landscape and the interior of the studio, largely informed by two weeks spent in Studio 9 at Porthmeor earlier this summer. Noticing how the structures and layers in the studio – vessels, jugs of blooms, open artists’ books, existing paintings – paired with the organic forms of the landscape beyond, allowed new paintings with a different overall spatial dynamic to form.

SARAH WOODS
These works feature simplified palettes from the summer months in west Cornwall, with hues of cerulean blue and light alabaster defining the outline between sea and sky. Each painting draws on inspiration found in balanced compositions from the landscape, seasonally shifting between a gentle and elemental space. The relationship between colours and where they are placed brings such a feeling of these landscapes, so connected to the seasons and to the changing light through each day.

The studio is the quietest space which allows a meditation of colour, space and form. Textures in the landscape are understood through the tactile quality of linen and canvas, informed by the tranquillity of brushstrokes and movement of paint. Large-scale paintings touch on the meditative process of working by hand and are framed in unfinished oak, bringing focus to the natural simplicity of paint and canvas.

‘Making an object look like what you see is not as important as making the whole square you paint it on feel like what you feel about the object’ Georgia O’Keeffe.

TOMMY LUCAS
“I live in Carbis Bay, near St Ives, and have always found solace and inspiration in the rugged beauty of the Cornish landscape. I specialise in painting in monochromatic watercolour, a medium that allows me to capture the subtle nuances of light and shadow with delicate precision, allowing me to break an image down to its basic values. A painting often begins with an image chosen from my collection of archival photos and postcards.”

SHANNON BARTLETT-SMITH – POTS & PAPER
“Clay became a fundamental part of my life when I happened upon a hand-building workshop while studying at Bristol School of Art, after which I caught the bug and spent my lunch hour and early mornings busy at the wheel, learning the basics and enjoying the meditative space working with clay gave me.

Eleven years on, I’m in love with it as much as ever, spending the time in between moving to Cornwall and studying Contemporary Crafts at Falmouth University where I graduated with a BA Hons in Contemporary Craft.

I am currently developing my own tableware line, selling through galleries and shops I admire whilst also producing plates for restaurants. “