ART 'N' AB ART - Seeing And Believing - A Salthouse Church Exhibition

I'm reviewing this because my Husband said I had to, because he, much more than I, was incandescently annoyed by this exhibition. And whilst I can see and feel for his pain, I've encountered a lot of art of this quality over the years, so this disappointing exhibition gently rolled over me. They are artists who are trying and have no doubt put a huge amount of effort into this exhibition. I also have pause to consider, would I like harsh negative criticism thrown at me like excrement? Well, no I would not. But once you present your work in any public sphere, you do have to expect that it may not meet entirely universal praise and admiration.  None of this means a good public spanking is not required for the improved aesthetic health of the nation in general, you understand.

As you enter the church Jane Harper's artwork greeted you on the left as you enter. It was meant, in her eyes at least, to be some sort of homage to great woman from the past. These were most colourised stock photographs of female celebrities, sometimes in repetition with different colourways. There was some aspect of it that seemed misconceived, perhaps it was meant to be ironic or  a witty comment. Freda Kahlo sitting in a gas station, Audrey Hepburn dressed as a nun smoking a fag, Amelia Earhardt in her flying gear wearing an earring. I was left asking why? This did not raise a titter in me, this was just very lazy image making. More empty headed novelty than visually unique. I would expect to see this type of artwork in at sixth form A level, not by anyone who went to art school. I think it was this,  more than anything else that annoyed Hubby.

Later black and white photo montages in the exhibition, might be aiming to make a more direct point, but they were far too obvious or miss fired badly, if that is the case. The thing that made this still worse was these photo montages were just badly executed. Now, in my opinion you go one of two ways with photo montages, either execute it with the sharp precision of a photo-realist, or you exaggerate the collaged nature of it, by clumsily sticking a real earring on a stock photo of someone famous. Or do an Andy Warhol and crudely execute multiples of them in screen print. This does neither.

When it comes to Idris Walter's work, we have a very different and more tradition bound kettle of fish. That doesn't appear to complement or contrast beneficially with Jane Harper's.  Anyway, his work is all drawn in pastel. A varied mixture of landscape work, and drawings of rickety distressed walls or rural doors with bolts. The later are very competently executed, though to me the pastel gave them too soft an edge, so they always looked ever so slightly out of focus.

His landscapes don't really work for me, some of them looked too muddy as if the cat slept on them over night rubbing all the pastel into a mush of greeny grey fog. Traditional pastels lend themselves to softer gestural colour work, because they're inherently difficult to get sharp detail with. I felt a question all the time whilst looking at his work, why choose pastel? Surely there are much better mediums for this, watercolour, oil, acrylic. If you use photography as a reference in your drawing, as I think he must do, it begs the question what does pastel achieve that photography can't? What does executing these in pastel bring aesthetically to the fore that could not be better executed in another medium. And if, as I suspect, he may be drawing his beautifully copied rusticated doors in water based pastels or pencils, why not use water colour from the get go? 

When you chose pastel to work with, you have to go with the qualities of that medium. You have, in a sense, to prove to the on looker, that it is through this medium alone you can achieve something that is entirely unexpected to see executed in pastel. Here I see someone who seems most likely an extremely confident drawer in pencil, who moved on to doing work in pastel, simply in order to work in colour. Art sometimes requires a bit more than that. The Boyle Family made life sized casts of sections of roads and pavements, then painstakingly painted the cast to be a facsimile of the original thing, then hung that on a gallery wall to stunning effect.

I guess what is really annoying about this exhibition was its half hearted approach. I think these artists are both capable and can do better than this. We,on the other hand, have to See and Believe that what they are doing here is worth while our spending time looking it, this in the main it failed to do, sadly. 

CARROT REVIEW - 2/8

FEATURE - Brian Clarke - An Artist Apart 2011

 

The BBC recently re-posted this documentary onto I-Player, as a fitting commemoration of the life and work of this rather remarkable artist Brian Clarke. He died recently on the 1st July 2025. He was a painter, architect and stained glass artist who pioneered modern stained glass that didn't use lead. It is fabulously stunning work. Clarke was a very outspoken man, one very clear and uncompromising about his creative muse. He upset a good many people, but charmed equally as many. This is a rather wonderful documentary that gives you a real sense of his artistic process and of him as a man. You end up in quiet admiration for all he has achieved in a very productive life.

ART 'N ' AB ART - Continuum - A Salthouse Church Exhibition

 

Its a couple of years since Anglia Textile Works last had an exhibition at Salthouse Church, and I remember the art on show left a huge impression on me at the time. Coming just a few weeks since the rather excellent Stains & Traces exhibition, similarly focused on using textiles as a medium for feeling and self expression. Continuum is a group of female creatives, each with a recognisibly distinct approach to their medium, that maintains that tricky balance of being both adventurous and inspiring. Its also so easy to see how some of them have progressed and finessed their artistic styles in recent years. I'm certainly finding this artistic area hugely exciting to engage with as a spectator and as an artist. There is art here that frequently surpasses traditional paint on canvas. I come away with the bounce of a new fervour to approach my own creative projects in fresher exploratory avenues.

Niki Chandler

An artist whose whose work has becomes more impactful and controlled. The use of coloured gauzes in layering or printing continues, but its one large piece of quilting, a shimmering hanging of tones of blue that evokes seascapes. Their is also a sense of things visibly shifting uneasily, it is also apparently a meditation on her mothers dementia. 

Heidi McEvoy-Swift

A textile artist who also does work making theatre costume, she utilises this as source for thefabrics she uses in a variety of mediums, patchwork and sculptural forms. Some strikingly effective small sculptures made from leaves were a stand out for me here.

Annette Morgan

Annette employs quilting techniques in a wide range of richly dense colourings. Often hand printed fabrics of designs from sketch books, sewn and pleated to give the finished piece a sort of aged layering patina. 

Marian Murphy

A focus on forms hanging over-layered and textural bodies suspended in space. Some very accomplished hand work an emphasis on semi scupltural reliefs.  

Hannah Rae

Densely textured and sewn hangings, also ordinary items concealed beneath an intricate covering of coloured threads and stitches. Like many textile artists she is exploring the mark making potential of the hand or machined stitch, as a means of expression.

  

Claire Spender

Another artist utilising the hand sewn and textural qualities in a collage or semi sculptural manner. Its like free hand drawing but in threads and rough fabrics.

  

Cherry Vernon-Harcourt

A minimalist landscape aesthetic plane, applied here with fabric and threads. The use of linen often layered over laid on items, or scumbled with colour stains, and fine twisted lines of many coloured threads which offer us a shimmering moving horizon point. Really refined skills on show here.

Irena Wilmott

A really interesting application of felted textiles as wrappings and coverings of often recognisible items. As though something alien and intrusive has taken them over and is concealing and absorbing their essence. Genuinely unsettling and fascinating work.

 

CARROT REVIEW - 7/8

ART ''N' AB ART - Stains & Traces - A Salthouse Church Exhibition

 

When there is a exhibition that is shared between a number of artists, their artistic styles can be complementary or not. Sometimes there is too much variance in their differing approaches, its hard to discern any commonality in aesthetic or motivational approach. This exhibition Stains and Traces at Salthouse Church was rare, in that there was both individuality and a shared sense for a particular form of aesthetic exploration. There was a love for the qualities of textures, fabric, to overlay, to let them absorb paints and waxes, to roughen and fray, the quality of line and materials used was as important as the most conventional of landscape painters. Also how these can be used expressively to associate and conjure up a sense for the North Norfolk marshlands in particular

Mary Morris's works explore the textures of decay, how text and paper stains and distorts. there is something apocalyptic about her assemblages as if these strange artworks have been put together from found remnants of a lost culture. But almost as if lacking the knowledge to interpret them they are collected and displayed like artefacts in an archaeological museum often are. 

Annabel Faraday approaches her making of ceramic objects, as a form of reciprocity and produces in stoneware a version of the found objects texture. In the process exaggerating and heightening its surfaces and staining. So in this exhibition there are small pieces of ceramic made to resemble corrugated iron or boxes. The verisimilitude is only a part of the story here, for it is also about the artists closely observed eye for the significant detail to focus their skill, and your eye, upon.

  Denise Jones textile artworks utilise the fraying of fabrics, that almost unravel themselves across a piece. There is also the use of lines sewn across fabrics like drawn creases in the picture planes. The overlaying of textures and the autobiographical use of written text. 

 Carly Ralph's pieces explore repeated forms in blocks assembled like tiling. The fabrics often quite coarse and weather worn from found sources. To echo the movement of waves or the delamination of materials once they become damp. That process of change captured and hung on a wall.

 

Debbie Lyddon is probably the more locally well know of the artists exhibiting here. The hangings she produce show us very North Norfolk marshland landscapes but formed from stained and rusted canvases, pierced with rings or cut back to hanging threads. Evocatively poised in an exploration of how watery landscape can be expressed through the medium of ships canvas and boat chandlery. Her work has a strong sense of place and history.

As you can see just from these few pictures,there is a thematic overlap between them all. This gave the exhibition a coherence a lot of shared gallery shows lack. This was quite the best exhibition I've seen in Salthouse Church. I hope they all come back to do more in future years.

CARROT REVIEW 6/8

THEATRICAL REVELATIONS - The Power of Theatrical Madness

A performance conceived by Jan Fabre, given at the ICA in 1984 & The Royal Albert Hall in 1985.

In the mid 80's I would go to the ICA in London, and take in some performance work or exhibition. Often just on hearsay alone. This prompted my first encountered with Jan Fabre's work The Power of Theatrical Madness. I guess, buoyed by Laurie Anderson's recent breakthrough into the mainstream, everyone was on the look out for who the next performance artist might be, to do a similar cross over. 

Fabre's work had shock value. It had its moment of ART charging into the rarefied halls of middle brow culture. Robert Mapplethorpe produced a book of photos of it. But these days I think its largely forgotten, quite how impactful and influential The Power of Theatrical Madness was at the time.

Jan Fabre's The Power of Theatrical Madness, was, as the title indicates, quite a bit more of a 'theatrical' than an art performance event. Large set piece dramatic happenings that evolved into these often bizarre rituals across the stage. This was a collective ensemble presentation, tightly choreographed, executed with devotion, physical stamina and passion. At over four hours in length this performance was not for sissys. Click here to see trailer -The Power of Theatrical Madness

With no particular narrative thread, The Power of Theatrical Madness, had more the air of a lunatic grand opera, with its evocatively lush background of minimalist music by Wim Merton. What the piece celebrates is the strength of grand dramatic events on stage as a window into the soul of humanity. Whilst also showing us its darker Wagnerian shadow side.

One major theme is our desire to think we are in control of our lives, relationships and reality itself. In this we always fail. By falling into habits, we are touching on an air of regret and ennui. The larger this is writ upon the stage, the more powerful it becomes as a theatrical staging. But also more dangerous, as Fabre's work points toward the use by monarchical and fascistic powers, of all our present elite forms of theatre.

This work exploits the drama inherent in  simple human movement endlessly repeated. A gesture, that might start out as banal, changes in our perception as we watch it repeated, into drudgery, irritability, exhaustion, empathy, beauty, pathos, and on occasions, transcendence.

We have a line up of men in black fatigues and shirts, forced to carry and hold up stacks of plates. At the conclusion the plates are deliberately shattered. In a crashing cascade of rebelliousness and creative carnage. There are also naked kings wearing crowns waltzing around  together. Yeah, it's a bit kinky too.

The piece was long, it tested your power of endurance to be sure. But, for me it was entirely worth it for the last plaintive element in the entire performance. This was set to the a beautiful elegiac movement by Merton, called Whisper Me. In it there is a man and woman. The man down stage moves upstage and lifts the woman into his arms, taking her down stage where he places her on the floor. The woman rises and initially with a certain playful coquettish spirit moves back to where she was at the start. 

This scenario is repeated over and over for the duration of twenty minutes. By which time the man is becoming increasingly tired and clumsy in the execution of picking her up and carrying her upstage. Whilst the woman progressively asserts her own agency with more stridency. This one section of The Power of Theatrical Madness, was worth the entrance fee. It was probably the most beautiful moving piece of theatre I've ever seen. Both poignant and profound. 

Such was its success at the ICA. A much larger venue, the Royal Albert Hall was booked. And I went along to see the same piece on much a larger stage, with larger back projections. The power of the grand gesture in a small space, did feel diminished when you placed it in a performance venue that possessed huge size and grandeur itself. Whilst I understood why they'd chosen to do this. The whole piece lost the sense of human intimacy by that transference. A long gallery in a stately home, or a smaller opera house might have worked better. Though it did strike me that it's ironic gloss of the fascistic rally, was made even more unpalatable by the vastness of the elliptical hall context. Over forty years later, it is still something I'm really glad I saw.

ART n ab ART - Thinking Through Drawing Exhibition

This exhibition has a broad and eclectic range of artists. They are all using drawing as a means to explore ideas, ways of thinking about what they are doing - through technique imagination or concept. Four exhibitions into this year's programme, and this is the first one to both excite and challenge.

There is the usual mix of bold, the boring, as well as baffling work on show here. Stretching your ideas of what drawing can be and do. Proving you can sketch using a wider variety of media, it doesn't have to be just pencils, pens or charcoal. Though there are example of those here too. The rapidly executed sketch and the slowly evolving and more considered drawing. But there is also room for drawing that has immense thoughtfulness and insight within it. 

The stand out work, for me, was Sam Hodge's beautifully evocative drawings of broken tablet and smart phone screens. The cracks in the screens are carefully transfered and etched into plasticated sheets, that are then inked and printed. There was also an accompanying book, which has text on the opposite page explaining how the screens got broken in the first place. With brilliant titles such as - It works, which is the main thing - Nick thinks there is a delicious irony in the Universe -  A lot of things have happened. The overall title for this work A Catalogue of Misfortune, could be a statement about the human condition. The associations and humanity of these drawings provoking further thought.

Other drawings worthy of note are Phillip Walmsley's 3D sculptural like drawings of imaginary spaces and Marion Piper's sequences of tonal forms and shapes.

CARROT REVIEW  - 6/8

ART n ab ART - 8 x 8 Exhibition

The second exhibition of The Salthouse summer season, is work by a handful of professional artists. The styles of art work on show is very broad, from cleanly formed still life's, to horse paintings, to richly textural abstracted landscape painting, to paintings of striped mugs in various stacked formations.

It was not an aesthetic triumph on the whole. Collectively it feels just a very odd mix of not very complementary styles of painting. Little noticeable dialogue going on between the disparate range of pieces on show. The artist whose work I most appreciated was Rachel Thomas, whose loose and expressive use of colour, playing with the form of the landscapes she paints, I've appreciated previously. It's exciting to look at someone fully in charge of her style, but constantly pushing at its boundaries. The other artists, frankly, I could take of leave. Skilled painters, but with not a lot to say, at least to me.

CARROT REVIEW - 3/8

ART 'n' ab ART - Exhibition Reflecting God's Glory

It's April, and the exhibiting venues of North Norfolk kick off this seasons arts programmes. The opening exhibition at Salthouse Church, arrived mid April. Its by a group of artists who are practicing Christians. The Salthouse logo has been updated, as has its byline -  Christian Creatives - Reflecting God's Glory. Perhaps this is to make it clearer what the objective of these exhibitions is. An emphasis I wasn't aware of previously.

The first thing arising out of this change was a question of what it meant - are these Christians who are also artists, or artists who make overtly Christian themed art? Well, judging by this exhibition, its mostly the former. Is there then anything in the art that draws on a Christian perspective or experience in a specific, identifiable manner?  Not particularly. The experience of nature as a creation of a divinity, is this one only the artist themselves experiences in the act of creation? Is it something we as a viewer can also experience? Not necessarily. It feels a much more nebulous conception than that.

These type of thoughts thumbed through my mind as I took in the art. I am just the same when I've seen art exhibitions of work by Buddhists. This is not me having a bash at Christians or their art. The sacred and artistic creation are old bed fellows. I believe that the sacred may be experienced through art, but almost by accident, not conscious design.  It's not unreasonable to ask, what was it in what I was seeing here that came from a particular Christian perspective? Was it tangible?

Our present views on nature, of being in nature, of painting nature,  arrived with Romanticism in the 18th & 19th century. They turned closeness to nature into a mystical, spiritual, neo religious experience. That this has so entered into our contemporary lexicon of ways to relate to the world, it is hard to see this today as the secular substitute for religious experience that art and nature now are. The idea of connecting with divinity through nature, thus powering your creativity, is not then something unusual, or specifically Christian in viewpoint anymore. No one can claim exclusive rights over it. Though Christians are perfectly free and entitled to point out what there inspiration is, as is everyone else.

However, words do not convey what a recipe actually tastes like. I tend not to think much about the context of a venue, and what that contrubutes to an exhibition. Salthouse provides a lovely medieval church setting within which to frame your exhibition. Despite all of the centuries old creativity all around me. I found a lot of the art work here visually underwhelming. There were a couple of artists whose work I really did find I appreciated.

Sue Walsh's textile pieces use a botanical eco print technique enhanced by natural dyes. I enjoyed the subtlety of their muted tones and the loose sense of patterning across soft thin fabrics. They reminded me at times of faded Roman murals painted on pigment absorbing gesso. Fabric has that ability to soften edges and create mists of illumination around printed objects.

The other was a sound installation by Cecilia Tyrrell. Echoing wild sounds of winds and movement, with accompanying darkly atmospheric photographs. Which they seemed to capture the earthy fetid and salty nature of this sea marshy area. Both artists seemed to have something to say that made you stop, and want to contemplate them further.

There was a wide range of skill levels on show here. From slightly unformed drawing and painting skills through to the highly polished professional level paintings of landscapes. With the latter, I was left wondering whether the observation of an actual place and landscape had parted company, and had become subsumed by the fully worked out execution of a style of painting. And this being mistaken for expression. Feelings abstracted, perhaps to the point of not reaching the canvas.

Not generally a notable start to this seasons programme. Lets hope for better over the coming months.

CARROT REVIEW - 3/8

ART 'n' ab ART - Rule 4 - Consider Everything An Experiment

This short opening four day run kicks off the 2024 programme of art exhibitions at Cromer's Artspace.

It's based around the work of a community of artists from Art Pocket, who chose to focus on Rule 4 of Sister Corita Kent's ten rules to guide creativity. Rule. 4 encourages you to embrace the process, see everything as an experiment. Art as an ongoing unfolding, a personal revelation, that has no end goal as such. Just enjoy the experience of the ride. Which from an artists experiential level is fine. My doubts about it as a theme for an exhibition are largely from the viewers experience of it.

There are a wide range of expressive media on show here, from traditional drawing and painting, to assemblages and textiles. As an exhibition it fails to work, feeling as though its a bit half cock. If it's really a series of works in progress, that makes what you see here unfinished business. There is little sense of context, completion or resolution of any exploration. 

It's clear some artists have already chosen their form and medium, and I don't see this embodying an openhearted experimental spirit. There is a lot if very specifically worked out idioms on show here. 

That said their were one of two artworks that I found beautifully executed pieces. I hope there are better quality exhibits planned, as this was not a particularly great start.

CARROT REVIEW - 3/8

FEATURE - The Yellow Scream

 I owe my Husband for this one. He has put me on to the work of this guy. Its sort of self explanatory, so I'm not going to write anything about it at all. Yes, its hilarious, but I also would call it truly wonderful. This is a drastically edited version, the full video lasts forty minutes.

Now, doesn't that make your day feel a whole lot better?

ART 'n' Ab ART - Colour Autumn Show

Alastair Grey

Bob Catchpole

Ulrike Behrendt

Earlier open exhibitions at Cromer Artspace were a very mixed bag in the skill and talents of those exhibiting. This years choice of a theme, rather than random submissions, makes the Autumn Open Show a much more coherent event. Plus the quality of the work has risen considerably, now that the Artspace is getting better known and renowned. So there was some quite striking and notable work on that theme of Colour on show.

Jennifer Lovatt

Charles Sharpe

Juliet Goodden

Clive Dunn

As ever with the curating of their exhibitions, it manages to show you a wide range of interpretations of how a feeling for colour can be expressed. So we have figurative, abstract, photographic, etchings, screen prints, collage and inevitably mixed media, plus things which are three dimensional utilising woven textile, leather, wood or glass. This was, yet another, really fine show, from this still relatively new art venue.

Polly Cruse

June Croll

Antonia Clare