Winter 2024

This year our winter window shows this elegant mobile by Corrie Williamson alongside Fi Brown’s paintings and prints.

Corrie’s elegant mobiles with floating lines and exquisite balance employ brass arcs and woods that are sourced from felled trees in the streets of London, and off-cuts from the furniture making process. This example uses light, mid and dark-toned woods from sycamore, ash, bog oak and bubinga trees.

As well as these mobiles, Corrie’s practice includes the making of hand-formed jewellery pieces that use recycled gold and silver. Examples of her work for sale and more about her practice can be found here.

Fi Brown sees her artwork as close to Imagist poetry or ‘visual haiku’ in that she begins with small everyday encounters with places, people, objects or materials, and layers of meaning extend from these.

She is interested in how a quick event, gesture or observation in the moment—the meeting of two coloured liquids, or a sensory experience—can be transcribed and reinterpreted through a slow and deliberate process, such as Japanese woodblock carving and printing.

Fi combines defined shapes, territories, boundaries, and borders with accidental, fluid, and instinctive elements. This is often expressed through calligraphic brush marks and the use of materials that both protect and resist, such as wax, oil, felt and water.

She is currently making prints, drawings, paintings and collages influenced by coastal light, staircases and thresholds, poetry, geological maps and wheelbarrows, amongst other things.

Fi has recently travelled to Japan to spend time exploring Mokuhanga woodblock printing and is excited by the potential of this unique printmaking practice for her work.

Fi’s limited edition woodblock prints are available to buy here

Our winter show, Prospect Cottage: Inside Out/Outside In, is an exhibition of cyanotypes made as part of a residency at Prospect Cottage—Derek Jarman’s house in Dungeness in Kent—by Sonia McDuff, the first time these images have been exhibited.

These new works are some of the results from an inaugural Residency series held at pioneer filmmaker, artist, activist and gardener, Derek Jarman’s Dungeness home, Prospect Cottage in December 2022.

Since 2020, McDuff has been working using the historical photographic practice of cyanotype, the original form of blueprints, which uses the UV of the sun to expose images. Sonia works with botanicals which have served as an ally in her own form of ‘polite activism’ highlighting the beauty of everyday wildflowers, essential for conserving our declining rates of biodiversity.

The Residency, by virtue of its restrictions—no making of images are permitted in Prospect Cottage, unless looking out of the window—gave way to a new way of working; a rekindling of joy in using black and white photography, creating transparency ‘cells’ and essentially playing, with outcomes unknown, except that the images would be blue. Sonia was keen to make the most of her time at Prospect Cottage whilst respecting the rules of the house and the garden, even when it meant a break from her usual practice of collecting botanicals to use in her work. All works were made in situ, experimenting with what might be possible.

The images made here for Frank represent a new prism through which Sonia was able to view the stills of the Residency. By using the modern technology of a digital camera, an inkjet printer, a hairdryer, alongside hands scratching and finger painting with the inkjet ink onto the transparency sheets and playing with double exposures. The cells are then processed by way of a Victorian method, imbued by alchemy, all the while representing the values and practices that Jarman would have approved of: activism, play, nature, beauty. No waste.

All works available to buy in store. Do email us for details.

With thanks to Sam Grady Photography for the images.