We are delighted to introduce the work of ten exciting new artists and sculptors alongside many familiar favourites.

Deborah Gourlay returns to the gallery after many years. A South American childhood developed her love of colour and pattern, while architectural spaces fascinate her. An opportunity to spend four years as artist-in-residence at Glyndebourne inspired these pieces – exploring theatricality through architecture, design and costume. The incredible sets and designs of Operas such as Il Barbiere and A Midsummer Night’s Dream come alive with her brush. We are delighted to bring these vibrant pieces to our own gallery space.

Catriona Millar likewise plays with bold pattern and colour but in portraiture, often of herself. She combines the modernistic with the naïve and nostalgic to create her unique, playful and emotive works.

We have three new landscape artists in Laura Cramer, Gabrielle Moulding, and Gabriel Langlands. Gabriel began painting full-time last year and is largely self-taught. As a young man he spent years at sea partly working on fishing trawlers in the Norwegian Arctic. Leaning to abstraction he has found a similarity between the rippling East Sussex fields and the ocean waves. Inspired by British Neo-Romantics, he uses simple, restrained brush strokes to convey the complex beauty of ancient landscapes.

Gabriel Langlands, Priory Fields

Gabrielle Moulding, Piazzo San Marco

Gabrielle Moulding, known as Ella, relishes paint using energetic strokes of oil, acrylic, watercolour, or charcoal to bring depth and atmosphere to her works. She makes studies en plein air before translating them in the studio.  A residency on the Grand Canal in Venice was the inspiration for the dazzling Venetian landscapes shown in the gallery.

Laura Cramer similarly uses abstraction to render landscapes with playful design. A childhood spent in coastal Ireland, exploring the meeting of rock, water, texture, light, surface and pattern is still present in her work. Laura’s detailed sketch books are the starting point for her larger works. Everything is observed, distilled, and set down en plein air, forming the basic structure. From this she expands the painting building a space and place with layers, hovering between memory and her joy in the expressive nature of paint.

In the three-dimensional Archie Browning, is an exciting, emerging artist, and son of current exhibitor Lucy Lutyens. He studied stone carving in Italy, India, and Mexico, which brings a meditative aspect to his artistic practice. His totemic pieces echo prehistoric structures working both in stone and innovative mixed media techniques.

Multi-disciplinary sculptor Mark Bowman is another practitioner with a unique route into fine art: he worked as an architectural technologist and spent many years on offshore oil rigs. He works in stone, wood, and metal as well as materials created for construction such as aerated concrete blocks or laminated plywood. His pieces offer a meeting between nature and technology with a particularly unique perspective. You can hear more about his influences and inspirations in a Q&A which gives a fascinating insight into his practice.

Mark Bowman, Shell #1

Régis Chaperon’s  extraordinary origami-like animal forms carved from marbles and limestones, marry the fragility of paper with the robustness of stone. Geometric forms and lines offer a sense of mathematical modernism to the natural world. Tobias Ford likewise creates sculptures of animals or people but through the delicate assembly of steel. He explores the aestheticism of line, depicting the character of the subject through its pose.

We are also introducing Jane Gordon Clark to the gallery. A career spent in design informs her work. Largely figurative in nature, her sculpture is lyrical and theatrical. Her subjects, often dancers, are carefully posed in gracefully extended forms, creating a sense of drama and controlled tension.

Mel Fraser works intricately in stone to create stunningly carved natural forms, echoing shells, coral, and rippling waves. She has been exhibiting across the country and Europe to great success, and her work is held in collections across the world.

We’re also bringing Hamish Holman into the gardens for the first time. Hamish works full-time as a sculptor, completely his own works alongside assisting internationally recognised sculptor and fellow exhibitor at Moncrieff-Bray, Dominic Welch. Studying geology, music and fine art, with a deep-rooted curiosity in natural wonders, his work has many links to geometry, and the diversity of natural forms while constantly evolving and pushing the stone’s possibilities and limits.

We do hope you can visit soon.

Mel Fraser, Sacro Corallo