Crossing Boundaries
19 - 30 October 2022
Wed to Sun, 12-5pm
Private View :
Thursday 20 October 6 - 8pm
Badge Making Workshop
Saturday 29 October 12 - 3 pm, Drop-in
Come and design and make your own badge which we will then press in a special badge making machine. We will be taking the theme of landscape and the environment for our inspiration.
Suitable for children of five and up and their carers.
Free Event.
Exhibiting Artists: Amanda Ansell, Zoe Benbow, Hannah Brown, Rebecca Partridge, Polly Townsend, Joanna Whittle.
Crossing Boundaries
This exhibition presents a diverse group of contemporary female landscape painters, each innovating within the genre. The grouping of female painters directly addresses the significant gender disparity in this area of painting for centuries and up to the modern day. The history of painted landscapes has been dominated by the male perspective and this exhibition, seen entirely through the female gaze, helps form a more collective story.
The artists examine the essential criteria, the recognisable truths, of landscape painting: techniques, concepts, aesthetic sensibilities & inherent relationship with the medium. They look at how the real meets the imagined, plein air versus studio, and how the specific and the abstract can interact. The exhibition also examines the relationship between experience and representation, such as restrictions on physical freedom & personal safety for women. All whilst contemplating the ongoing changes in the landscapes themselves.
The artists have a variety of approaches to landscape painting.
Joanna Whittle makes intimate paintings that touch on the sensuous handling of the romantics, whilst connecting with the history of miniatures. Her small almost hallucinogenic paintings are alongside the enveloping watery landscapes of Amanda Ansell whose work is similarly sensuous but handled abstractly via simple forms and wide overlays of colour.
Hannah Brown and Polly Townsend are embedded in the figurative traditions of British landscape painting but have different subject matter: Brown works with local parklands and familial rural settings, Townsend works in remote, high-altitude locations.
Rebecca Partridge makes work that, on first glance appears abstract, but is acutely observed objective painting of sky, while Zoe Benbow accumulates fragments of observations to bring together the real and the imagined.
Artist Introductions
Amanda Ansell www.amandaansell.co.uk
Amanda Ansell has an MFA from the Slade school of Fine Art. She has exhibited widely, including at The Royal Academy and Kettles Yard in Cambridge and has work in both national and international public and private collections. Amanda Ansell is a member of The Contemporary British Painting Group and was nominated for the Jerwood Contemporary Painters Prize and the Celeste Art Prize.
@aansellstudio
Zoe Benbow www.zoebenbow.co.uk
Zoe Benbow completed an MA at the Royal College of Art. She has undertaken solo shows and residencies across the UK and Internationally, including Artists in Residence at The British–Kazahk Society in Kazakhstan and a solo exhibition at The Wordsworth Trust. Zoe is also an experienced artist educator, leading workshops and teaching painting and drawing at graduate and post-graduate level.
@zoebenbow
Hannah Brown www.hannahbrown.info
Hannah Brown has an MA from the Royal College of Art. Selected solo exhibitions include Frestonian Gallery, Union Gallery and Gimpel Fils. In 2020 her work featured in the John Moores Painting Prize and in 2018 at The London Open at Whitechapel Gallery. She has works in collections worldwide, including at the V&A in London.
@hannahbrownartist
Rebecca Partridge www.rebeccapartridge.com
Rebecca Partridge completed an MFA at the Royal Academy. She has exhibition widely both in the UK and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle CCA Andratx, Spain and at Konstkraft Ljusne, Sweden. She has been awarded several international scholarships including from The Nordic Kunstnasenter Dale, Norway, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, USA, and The Terra Foundation for American Art Fellowship in Giverny, France. Rebecca has curated a series of exhibitions taking place in Germany, Norway and the U.K, most recently at Nottingham University and Parafin Gallery, London. Rebecca is also a lecturer at West Dean college.
@rebeccaannepartridge
Polly Townsend (curator) www.pollytownsend.co.uk
Polly Townsend completed an MFA at The Slade School of Fine Art. She has exhibited widely throughout the UK and USA and has paintings in the Permanent Collection of the Department of State USA and the National Parks Collection USA. She has won several awards, including the Slade Life Drawing Prize and has completed artists residencies globally, including in Death Valley and Badlands National Parks. In 2023 Polly will be Artist in Residence in the Antarctic, hosted by the Royal Navy. Polly is concurrently curating an exhibition of female mountain painters the The Alpine Club, London.
@polly_townsend
Joanna Whittle www.joannawhittle.com
Joanna Whittle studied at Central Saint Martins and Royal College of Art. She has had solo exhibitions at Agnews and the Museum of London and group shows include the John Moores Painting Prize and Royal Academy. In 2019 she was joint winner of the Harley Open Prize and Winner of the Contemporary British Painting Prize and she was selected for the Freelands Artist Programme. She was also the winner of the New Light Prize Exhibition Valeria Sykes Award and is a member of the Contemporary British Painting Society.
@jowhittleart