‘Glorious Awakening’ Autumn & h.Art Exhibition 2021

Through h.Art week the gallery will be open daily from 11am – 5pm

Karin Celestine

Karin is an artist and author, who creates needle felted animals of charm and character, including the stars of her own delightful stop-motion animations and her series of children’s books.

Her joy in the natural world is also reflected in her sculptural copper pieces which complement her felt-work. Although these have all sold, there will be a new collection on the way soon.

See more needle felted creatures by Karin here

Tamsin Abbott

Tamsin’s work is influenced by the Herefordshire countryside, the orchards, the hills, the woods and all the plants, birds and animals that grow and live. Tamsin works on mainly British made mouth blown glass, in  fabulous colours. She  completely covers the glass with a special black glass paint which is  totally opaque. When the paint is dry Tamsin then scrapes back into it using a variety of simple tools. She uses the paint like a scraper board which is working in the negative to achieve an effect rather like a woodcut.

See more stained glass panels and limited edition prints by Tamsin here

Barbara Shaw

Barbara creates art in textiles and ‘paints’ with fabric, making images by hand-stitching small pieces of material together in layers. She hope’s to interpret subjects in a fresh way which encourages viewers to take a second look.

Barbara will be demonstrating her techniques in the gallery on Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 11am – 1pm during h.Art week. Do pop in and have a chat with us.

She is a self-taught artist having started experimenting with fabrics after sewing patchwork quilts.  Her work includes elements of both art and craft which reflects her interest in Impressionist paintings and the process of handcrafting. The subjects she stitches include buildings, creatures, plants, landscapes and still lives.

See more textile collage pictures by Barbara here

As well as regularly exhibiting in galleries and exhibitions in the south of England she has recently been Artist-in-Residence at two National Trust properties: Chastleton House, a 17thC House in the Cotswolds and Claydon House, an 18thC House in Buckinghamshire. In 2014 she was awarded a prize for Excellence in Craft in Oxfordshire and a picture was bought for Oxfordshire County Museum collections. Her work has also featured in magazines such as Cotswold Life, Be Creative with Workbox and Craft and Design as well as an Australian and an American publication.

Ali Tregaskes

Ali is a contemporary jewellery designer/maker, based in Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire and originally from Cornwall. Ali decided in 2004 to study at Hereford College of Art as a mature student; fulfilling a long awaited passion to work with metal. She started with metal sculpture, slowly scaling things down over the years and now creating jewellery, which still retains a sculptural quality to it.

Ali works in a lovely workshop in Ross on Wye, with other designer makers around her, she specialises in etched and oxidised silver jewellery, using occasional accents of 18ct gold.

See more jewellery by Ali here

Combining her love of photography with her metal work, Ali uses her images of nature, architecture and coast to create the etchings. The silver etching has largely been self-taught. Other  techniques Ali employs include oxidising, saw piercing, soldering and granulation.

Ali creates jewellery that appeal to both men and women. “All of my pieces have an honest feel to them; a solid and enduring quality whilst also retaining a delicacy, which I think comes from the fineness of the etching.”  The collections are entirely handcrafted; each piece individual and unique, which is hugely important to Ali. Ali is a member of the Worcester Guild ‘Contemporary Craft’, Shropshire Guild of Contemporary Craftsmen and JASSO Jewellery and Silver Society of Oxford.

Anna Ravenscroft

‘As luck would have it I managed to be born in a wild and remote place in Scotland and insisted on being carried up a mountain when a bundle of a few weeks. An understanding mother shared my need and as we approached the summit, she gave me a sweet smelling white thistle which I still have. This first journey was to be very symbolic in my life and work.

A childhood of poverty and hardship – but unrestricted freedom to roam, plus two brothers, meant days of walking from dawn till dusk. A small packet of bread and some orange juice was supplemented by dug field potatoes, cattle molasses and beech leaves.

See more limited edition etchings by Anna here

“I brought home and nursed shot rooks, injured rabbits, hares, mice etc. We built tree houses from hay and branches, all day and every day – nature was ours – life outside the sweet smell of hay barns and the ripe smell of pond mud really didn’t exist except as something that loomed ahead.”

The clash of a place in an art college or an audition for the National Youth Orchestra was, at 15, a difficult decision. Finally, I chose the college of art. After all I could draw my hares and rooks couldn’t I?! A degree in painting and printmaking was followed by a Post Graduate Degree in Art Education. With this I began teaching. This took me again to wild parts to teach adults and children who were more deprived of the creative side of life. In between I was able to travel and paint.

Helen Martino

Helen describes her pots as ‘serious, posh and frivolous’ because for many years she was a functional potter, making batches of domestic pots on the wheel. These recent sculptures are hand built individually and each is considered separately. This change in direction followed the death of her youngest child, Tom, at 15 in a steamboat accident.

Her work completely changed, and she started to use a hand building technique using soft and flexible sheets of clay. The sheets of clay are freely cut, curved and sometimes twisted. She plays with perspective by distorting the objects as in a stage set. By inclination she is also a painter, and views these flattened forms as three dimensional canvases. The surfaces are painted with slips, underglaze pigments, and resists. Sometimes she adds silver and gold lustres.

Helen is fascinated by body language and how it communicates. In her ceramic sculptures the exaggerated and stylised movements of the silent movies has seemed a natural way to portray communication and narrative as the sculptures depict moments in the everyday life of people.

She has been looking at Mogul and Persian miniatures and how they tell a story within a single image. Often they show significant events within the life span of a person or a family. Her sculptures are intimate in size and like the miniatures tell of a single moment or event and yet they infer a past and future story to be filled in by the viewer.

Helen works in a series of pieces within a single narrative, each successive sculpture expressing the story in a different way through a change in scale, movement, composition or colour.

See more ceramics by Helen here