A special Festival Exhibition at Old Chapel Gallery, Pembridge to run during the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts 2025, opens on Saturday May 17, continuing to the end of June, featuring the work of talented British artists and makers from far and near. This year we are combining this exhibition with our Garden Sculpture show ‘Shadows on the Grass’ which will run throughout the year, featuring the work of several sculptors new to the gallery.
Artist Mary Griffin, with her vibrant pastels of gardens and intriguing interiors, uses gouache or watercolours to provide interesting surface contrasts and atmospheric effects. Many of her paintings are a glimpse of a moment in time. Her chief concern is to make a statement about life which most people will relate to from their own experience, but narratives are left to be interpreted by the viewer.
Jemima Jameson works mainly in acrylics, preferring to paint onto wooden panels, bowls and furniture. Her desire to paint and draw has been part of her whole life and is quite simply a celebration of the natural world that she is compelled to describe. Her wooden boxes and cabinets often serve as treasure chests for cherished keepsakes.
New to the gallery is potter Karen Williams, offering her modern versions of traditional slipware. Each piece is individually made, drawings are incised into the creamy liquid clay revealing the red clay body, lending definition and precision to her painterly designs of birds and foliage. Karen makes pieces to be used daily to eat and drink from, taking inspiration directly from nature and the stunning wild landscape and coast of Pembrokeshire where she has made her home for the past 20 years.
We welcome Joey Richardson, an internationally acclaimed woodturner and sculptor from Lincolnshire combining fine art with traditional craftsmanship and innovative techniques. Through piercing, carving, colouring and layering, she transforms turned forms into translucent vessels. Each piece tells a story, its fragility and strength inviting the viewer to look beyond the surface and consider what it is to be marked by experience, yet still be capable of beauty, renewal, and transformation.
Karin Celestine, fibre artist, writer and illustrator from Monmouthshire, crafts delightful collections of needle felted creatures from hares to badgers and mice, each one with its own charm, character and mischief, who populate the world of kindness and creativity portrayed in her books. She can happily turn her hand to making all creatures great and small, mythical and real.
Rachel Ricketts spent years conserving antiquities and works of art, and restoring wall paintings, predominantly in ecclesiastical buildings and stately homes. A newly acquired English Toy Terrier inspired her to sculpt, becoming her first, very wriggly, subject. Entirely self-taught, her experience with materials and techniques, including patination processes, has proved invaluable.
Having spent 12 years in London working as a prop-maker and model engineer for the film industry, Archie Kennedy had the opportunity to go to New Zealand to work on the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy for two years. He was sent to the blacksmith’s shop on the first day and never looked back. He now produces one-off sculptures, based in a converted Shropshire barn. We look forward to hosting a selection of his sleek and pensive penguins, reflecting on the sad state of the environment.
Long established sculptor Helen Sinclair makes limited edition and unique contemporary semi-figurative pieces of slender elegance. Using a life model regularly, she occasionally finds poses that inspire a whole series. Relishing the energy of modelling in plaster, clay, wax or resin, she make her own moulds and casts her work into bronze, resin or concrete.
Angela Palmer prefers to work with a model directly from life, hoping to capture some of the human qualities expressed by the body. Her sculpture is a direct response to the beauty of the human form, first modelled in clay, then cast into bronze resin, its surface given a patina by a process which accelerates the natural weathering of the bronze and produces some subtly beautiful colours.
Firm favourites Ian Gill and Neil Lossock will be amongst other artist blacksmiths and sculptors gracing Old Chapel Gallery’s garden this year. All designed to give hours of pleasure to enhance time spent in the open air.
The gallery is open from Wednesday to Saturday 11 – 4.30pm and Sunday 12 – 4pm. Other times by appointment. Closed on Tuesdays.
For more information or to join the mailing list visit www.oldchapelgallery.co.uk or contact Yasmin on 01544 388842. All available online at oldchapelgallery.co.uk
