Art and Agriculture: Productive Land
- James Stewart
- Mar 25
- 28 min read
Updated: Jun 3
A Contemporary Landscape Exhibition at South Stoke
12 to 16 June 2025.
Introduction
In May 2024 Zimmer Stewart Gallery presented Art and Agriculture – South Stoke Idyll, in conjunction with Ryan Haydon, farmer at South Stoke, near Arundel.
The 2024 exhibition included paintings by Matt and Nick Bodimeade with an installation by Emma Hurst and a video FEED by Adam Stead.
The paintings, installation and video were directly related to the farm at South Stoke, and a response to our collective connection to the land and farming.
There was a talk/panel discussion benefiting The Sussex Snowdrop Trust during the exhibition facilitated by Adam Stead, with the three other artists and Ryan Haydon. A film of this talk and text is available here.
Productive Land
[Slide through the images above or click to see full screen. Hover to see details]
For Productive Land in 2025, we are building on the success of the 2024 exhibition and have developed the theme as well as broadened the number of artists taking part.
The term 'Productive Land' refers to an area that can support agriculture. Traditionally this means that it is capable of growing crops or supporting livestock. It is often characterised by fertile soil, access to water, acccessibility and suitable climate conditions. These days agricultural activities are much broader than crops and livestock, as set out below.
Food production is still the fundamental purpose of agriculture, a point raised by Ryan Haydon in his opening statement on the 2024 panel discussion.
He went on to say that the work of farming today has evolved to further activities beyond solely food production. Farmers are now encouraged to create a ‘green and pleasant land' for the increasing number of leisure seekers and to support biodiversity by creating woodlands, field buffers of wild flowers and new hedgerows.
Wild flower field margins also provide numerous benefits, including attracting pollinators and aiding in natural pest control.
Woodlands offer numerous benefits to farming, including: Providing shelter for livestock in harsh weather conditions and crops to reduce wind damage, improve water efficiency, reduce water erosion and even reduce spray drift from pesticides; diversifying income streams through timber and carbon credits; improving soil health and water quality; and of course enhancing biodiversity. Woodlands are used for recreational activities, such as walking, cycling, and camping, attracting visitors and generating other sources income for the farm.
So, for us Productive Land is the brief given to the 23 artists invited to submit works for this unique exhibition. This can be interpreted by each artist in their own way; for example, productive in this sense could include woodland, field margins, headland, etc.
Looking at the works submitted (see below) the wide range of representations are inspiring as they are stunning.
There are several themes running through them: Memories of people or places; the interplay of human and natural forces; highlighting biodiversity/sustainability; education or other community/charitable purposes as well as showing agricultrual land use.
It is clear that as well as appreciating the works for what they are, we can also delve deeper into the processes and meanings the artist has imbued into them.
All the artists taking part have a connection to Sussex - see below for images of work submitted and accompanying texts by each artist.
The exhibition in 2025 will take place from 12 to 16 June 2025 at South Stoke Barn, South Stoke, near Arundel, BN18 9PF:
The exhibition will be open everyday from 11am-6pm
The Private View is on Thursday 12 June, 6-8pm
A Talk on Art and Agriculture: Productive Land led by Ryan Haydon with James Stewart and Nick Bodimeade is on Friday13 June in support of The Sussex Snowdrop Trust. Tickets cost £25 and includes champagne and delicious canapés provided by Ren's Kitchen.
View the online flip book exhibition catalogue here.
Click the image left to go to The Sussex Snowdrop Trust website to find out more and buy tickets.
We are happy to be part of Arundel's Great Big Green Week.
This is a week of events celebrating and raising awareness about what can be done to protect and nurture our environment.
The paintings submitted for this exhibition with their accompanying texts (see below) show how the artists appreciate the delicate balance between food production, sustainability and recreation in Sussex.
Click on the image to find out more.
The 22 participating artists are:
Emily Ball
Emily Ball's paintings are images of her experiences of daily life. Fleeting sensations are made tangible and celebrated using rich and varied marks and the tactility of the materials that she uses.
She says of 'Dig Deep':
"It is a very important painting from the 'Longing and Sweet Sadness' body of work.
This collection of paintings is still growing and is both inspired by working in the woodland at the back of my parents house near Petworth but also significantly affected by the death of my father. The sense of loss and impermanence affected the way I approached this painting and created a very particular choice of colours, layering and mood.
The title does give reference to the woodland earth; rich leaf mould with it pinkish glow and its warm sweet earthy smell as you walk. It was also, however, an instruction to myself (both emotionally and creatively) as I poured, mopped, buried and dragged paint and lines across the surface as I searched for the right feeling from the work."
Matt Bodimeade
Matt Bodimeade’s oil paintings on canvas are completed in his studio from drawings, and pastel drawings created on site in an area of the South Downs which he knows well. The area around South Stoke and Offham was his playground as a child and first work place as a farm hand in his teens.
In most of these works there’s central motif: a wall, a track, a river or a railway. It is no coincidence that this division is often scythe or sickle shaped and seems to slice the landscape apart; the fields and woods suggest work, movement and energy, shaped like plough blades, discs, or saw teeth on either side of the central divide.
The paintings are carefully drawn, often from charcoal sketches made out in the field. The resultant oil painting reveals an enjoyment of colour for its own sake rather than a photographic representation. Pinks, oranges, acid yellows; whatever suits the mood he’s trying to capture.
Having studied at West Sussex College of Art and Design and Brighton Polytecnic, Matt worked on a number of public and private commissions throughout the UK (including the Cass Sculpture Foundation).
Nick Bodimeade
Nick Bodimeade’s paintings combine his fascination with the transformative possibilities of painting and its practical processes, with his interest in landscape as a work place, a place of pleasure and leisure and a place of ever increasing environmental and social concern.
He describes the experience of space as having for him a central role in both the experience of painting and of landscape. Perhaps you have stood on a hill top and felt a desire to throw yourself into space, to consume and be consumed by it and maybe to have felt this desire to be located somewhere deep within.
For whatever reasons and in what proportions, how landscape and its representations engage with this atavistic stew of powerful feelings is a key interest.
For Productive Land, Nick Bodimeade has started a new series of paintings of Hawks flying over the land, giving us an opportunity to think about seeing the landscape from the majestic predator's birds eye view.
This is reminiscent of Ted Hughes poem 'Hawk Roosting', which describes the hawk's unwavering focus on its purpose and its lack of remorse or empathy reflect the primal and instinctive nature of its existence or Hughes 'Hawk in the Rain', in which he contrasts the hawks effortless flight with man's clumsy efforts on land.
Nick Bodimeade's paintings are full of evocative colour, illusionary space, tactile handling and formally articulate composition, applied to the photographic source material, reconnecting it to the mind/body experience of being in the outdoors.
He changes how he paints according to subject matter and how he wants the work to be experienced, sometimes working with intensely coloured, slippery, creamy paint and fluid, sensual gestures, at others, with thin, rainy, slurry colour and a more tentative drawing where the image feels as if it is just emerging from the material. The ‘how’ of the painting as important as the ‘what’. Nick describes wanting his paintings to meet the viewer half way, engaging with shared experiences and ideas of our relationship to landscape and the flora and fauna that inhabit it.
Nick Bodimeade has extensive teaching and advisory experience at a number of UK art colleges at Foundation, HND, BA and MA levels: Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College; University College Chichester; Canterbury Christchurch University College; Amersham & Wycombe College; Northbrook College, Worthing & North Oxfordshire College of Art and Design, Banbury.
Pippa Blake
Pippa Blake was born in Portsmouth, England in 1954, and studied Fine Art (Painting) at Camberwell College of Art, London from 1972 to 1976 gaining BA Honours (First Class). In 2005 she graduated from the Visual Arts Programme, West Dean College, Sussex with a Postgraduate Diploma (Distinction).
Pippa Blake has travelled the world extensively but now lives and works on Chichester Harbour near the Hampshire/Sussex border, UK . She exhibits frequently both in the UK and New Zealand. She serves as a founding Trustee for BLAKE an organisation in New Zealand inspiring environmental leadership.
In 2015 & 2016 Pippa Blake worked as artist in residence at Chichester Festival Theatre during two productions - culminating in four exhibitions of the work produced - including the Garden Gallery at Pallant House in Chichester. Pippa Blake will again be artist in residence on the production of Lord of the Flies at the theatre later in 2025.
Pippa Blake's painting 'Oriental Purple' evolved from a photograph taken recently of an oriental purple minuza plant being grown in a polytunnel. The plant is one of many grown at Tuppenny Barn, which was once a one hectare green field in Southbourne, West Sussex. The director Maggie Haynes has established a centre of sustainability, growing organic vegetables, delivering inspirational education to schools, providing horticultural therapies and being a support to the community
Working in oils and using photographs and film stills as her starting point, Pippa Blake's paintings are imbued with soulfulness, and the moments captured in them feel unstable or unfixed, as though the viewer is witnessing the scene from a peripheral viewpoint. The paintings describe uncanny scenes that are at once familiar but so fleeting that they remain just out of reach. The poignancy that comes from this detached perspective evokes feelings that give the work its power and potency. Pippa Blake makes atmospheric paintings about moving through the landscape; the fleeting glimpses this reveals and the emotional journeys it triggers.
Tom Farthing
Tom Farthing gained his MA in 2013 from Chelsea College of Art, and his BA in 2005 from the Ruskin School, Oxford University. Inspired by artists such as Alex Katz, Tom Farthing re-imagines figurative painting in a contemporary context.
Farthing's subjects are concerned with memory and presenting familiar scenes that we can all relate to, evoking a specific and personal response from the viewer based on their own experience.
In the Fields in Winter, Tom Farthing presents us with a view near Seaford looking towards Cuckmere. We can see fields, trees and a house in the distance below the Downs. This is a matter of fact painting, with bold simplicity and heightened colours.
Tom Farthing is interested in how the divisions of the fields follow the forms of the landscape, and in the changing colours of the fields throughout the year as the land is worked, turned and crops grow. He is also aware of different uses of land - private land in the foreground, common land in the middle ground and agricultural land in the background.
Here the artist wants us to consider the relationship between the man-made structure and nature: Human activities have shaped the environment for millennia while also being influenced by natural features, resulting in the complex interplay of built and natural elements that we often see in the rural landscape.
During 2017 Tom Farthing was artist in residence at NES in Iceland, where he made drawings, watercolours and oil paintings from the landscape in and around Skagaströnd. He developed more work from his research on his return to London.
Tom Farthing has completed the Turps Banana Studio Programme. This provides a dynamic structure of: mentoring; peer-led learning; stimulating conversation and debate, through discourse and practice.
In 2022 his 'Fairground Pop' series of bright, pop art inspired paintings of familiar scenes at a fairground were exhibited at the London Art Fair. On viewing these works we are immediately transported to our own memories and can even hear the loud pop or organ music that always accompanies such visits.
Tom Farthing says "My work is engaged with painting the past at the same time as imagining a way forward for painting amongst the fast paced digital image saturated contemporary world".
Recent exhibitions include: The Elephant in the Room, Durden and Ray, Los Angeles in 2022; Slate Projects "Goloso" in 2018; Pleasure Islands, Artwork Atelier, Salford 2016; Young Masters Dialogues at Sphinx Fine Art, London 2015; Cynthia Courbett Gallery Summer Exhibition, London 2015; Projections, Zimmer Stewart Gallery, Arundel, 2015 (solo).
Tom Farthing is also a printmaker, creating thought provoking, semi-abstract screen prints.
John Harmer
John Harmer's painting practice is concerned with the formal elements of his chosen medium: form, colour and texture. He particularly enjoys experimenting with textural effects in surfaces.
The depiction of landscape and architecture in art, cinema and television, provides the impetus and inspiration for Harmer's work. These found images often establish a starting point for a piece. However, paint is a responsive medium and the completed painting may deviate considerably from the original source, occasionally tending toward abstraction.
He says "My memories of growing up on the Sussex coast, in close proximity to a harbour and farmland, inform the imagery for my painting, ‘Swamped’.
The mark-making within the painting is inspired by the textures, patterns and striations that occur in nature, as well as those imparted on the landscape by human activity."
For John Harmer, an open-ended and free approach is what makes painting such an exciting and compelling creative project.
Emma Hurst
Following last year’s large-scale installation for South Stoke Idyll—three dynamic, strung and suspended painted canvases that invited viewers to walk around, made in response to the vast local landscape and installed in dialogue with the undercroft architecture—Emma Hurst now presents a focused, singular work. This year’s painting translates the spatial complexity of that installation into a two-dimensional form: a stretched canvas designed to hang on the wall.
While shifting in scale and format, this new work continues Hurst’s deep engagement with the relationship between making and agriculture. Working from her shared studio at Offham Farm with fellow artist Matt Bodimeade, she draws from the rhythms, repetitions, and physical labour of the rural landscape—echoing them in the way she handles material, colour, and process.
The making of this painting began in the same ritualistic way as her larger installations: raw canvas torn from a roll, pigments dissolved in water to create vivid, shifting pools of colour, and the material laid out or suspended to absorb it. As the paint seeps through the fibres—laid flat on the ground or manipulated through folding and pressure—it leaves behind permanent lines and creases that speak to both time and process. These gestures echo agricultural methods: repetitive, physical, and necessary.
In this piece, however, Hurst intentionally worked against the natural behaviour of her materials. Where her process often embraces the medium’s tendency to soak, bleed, and blur, here she sought to control it—to layer colour deliberately, to define lines, to hold back the merging of pigment. It’s a tension between the artist and the material, a desire to resist what the fabric wants to do and assert a kind of quiet order within chaos. That resistance becomes part of the meaning of the work: a negotiation between control and surrender.
What differs here is the resolution of that process into a unified, contained surface. Where the previous installation dispersed its visual elements into a three-dimensional space, this painting gathers them into a single, compressed plane—compressing gesture, movement, and layering into a 2D composition. The result captures the spatial complexity and energy of an exploded collage, reimagined in a more focused, intimate format.
Geometric forms and colour blocks emerge through the layering, referencing both landscape and architecture. The piece becomes a condensed memory of past works and the land itself—shaped by process, yet open to interpretation. Hurst’s working method remains instinctive yet disciplined, driven by questions of when to act and when to hold back.
This new painting marks a shift in scale, but not in depth. It holds the same labour-intensive sensibility, the same material curiosity, and the same quiet dialogue with landscape. It offers a moment of stillness—an invitation to reflect on process, place, and the layered complexity of creative and agricultural life.
Frances Knight
France Knight is a landscape painter, she likes to work outside, directly from nature. Based in Arundel, she often paints in the Arun Valley and on the South Downs.
She says "I love the abstract quality of the fields, the geometric shapes and clean lines of the Downs, and the softness of the landscape around the River Arun."
"When you're painting outdoors, you have to work quickly, so I enjoy returning to the studio to develop these plein air studies on a larger scale. I love the physical quality of working in oils. Over time you can build up the layers, which enables me to explore and experiment more with colours, textures and abstract qualities."
In 'Winter Light, Arun Valley' Frances Knight has painted the long deep shadows created by the low sun in winter. This also highlights the strong geometrical shapes that winter light makes with the clean dynamic lines of the edges of the fields and ploughed furrows of the earth.
Frances Knight's subject matter is more about shape and abstract structure and how these change in a different light at different times of the day and in different seasons rather than about specific details of the landscape. In her work Frances Knight encorages a dialogue on the relationship between the two-dimensional surface of the painting with the illusion of space and light.
Andrew Milne
Andrew Milne has lived in Sussex his whole life, from early years in Clapham village and more recently on the edge of the South Downs National Park near Worthing. After studying at West Sussex College of Art 1976-1980, he followed a career in graphic design before becoming a full time artist in later years.
His paintings are inspired by walking through the Sussex landscape, where suddenly a composition will present itself - a pleasing arrangement made of the shapes of the Downs for example, or a certain light, the infinite patterns and combinations of colours due to agriculture, or the effect of the changing seasons. Sketches and reference photos form the source material for making paintings in the studio, which reflect a graphic style.
The painting ‘South Downs Way’ on show represents the combination of elements that demonstrates the idea of ‘Productive Land’ in the South Downs: a waymarked path and access areas for leisure purposes, agricultural fields with evidence of food production and also areas of ‘set aside’ planting for wildlife and diversity.
Karin Moorhouse
Karin has had studios in Chelsea, Covent Garden, Battersea and Surrey but for the last 25 years she has lived and worked in West Sussex. She remains continually inspired by her surroundings there, though London specifically and urban scenes generally, still hold a place in her heart and these influences are seen in her paintings.
For Karin it has always been the creative process that has been as important as the final work and changes occur regularly during the painting. At times she will work over older paintings which will then be incorporated into the new ones. She started life as a textile designer and following her roots pattern has been included in some of her work.
Tree Life began life as a plein air drawing up and around Burpham and has resulted in an oil painting on linen . The painting shows a bare tree in early spring with glimpses of the fields just starting to colour up, as it were, for the new season’s growth and life beginning again.
Karin says "It was painted over many sessions and changed often in the process but I am happy with how it sits now and I feel gives the viewer, through the branches, the sight and scale of the undulating land around it.
The fact that it was painted over with certain areas and details changed in the process reflects how the land changes with the seasons. The tree itself will of course be changing all year too but I caught it before it burst back into it’s own full bloom while it framed the landscape rather than dominated it."
Karin has exhibited many times at The Mall Galleries, London and has been part of mixed shows at Pallant House and The Oxmarket Galleries both in Chichester, Dragon and Kevis House Galleries both in Petworth and has been a regular participant in the annual Arundel and Brighton Festivals and Gallery Trails.
Her work is in several private collections around the world and she has run painting workshops in Mallorca, Italy, France and more recently on the beautiful island of Madeira. Over the years she has taught in schools, 6th form colleges, art schools and for the last few years has been running regular courses at The Mill Studio in Ford.
Paul Newland
Paul Newland NEAC RWS is fascinated by the way we see, for instance, a place – the ways in which our perceptions are overlaid or conditioned by memory, imagination, history and emotion.
He wants his work to stand on its own. He sometimes paints directly from places or things but mostly he works from drawings and studies. Often he attempts to combine recollection and imagination with observation, in a single picture.
He says "Watercolour absorbed most of my attention for many years and exerted an influence on the oil painting, which was resumed after moving from London down to Sussex in 2010. The ways that watercolour works has had a lingering effect on the oils - in the layering of colours and tones, for example.
Sussex has featured in my landscape subject matter, after a spell of Umbrian subjects and, of course, the London cityscape ( especially along the river), since moving here in 2010. The landscape changes constantly and I try to reflect this. There is possibly a hint of the pastoralism of some admired imagery - the photos in the old Batsford books on the counties or geography of England , for example, or the marvellously comprehensive works of S.R. Badmin.
Looking back over photos of my paintings at different stages in their development, it becomes apparent that I have not improved pictures so much as changed them, in the search for a kind of verisimilitude. There are sometimes two or three complete images beneath the one left at last."
Paul Newland have served as Vice President of the Royal Watercolour Society and continue to serve as its Honorary Curator
Lucinda Oestreicher
Lucinda Oestreicher’s current work originates in her meandering walks following the footpaths of East Sussex. In the studio this exploration of landscape and place shifts as the process of painting takes over.
Images evolve through a process of reworking, erasure and overpainting. Layers merge and shadows become solid forms, as hierarchies between objects and ground, figuration and abstraction dissolve.
A painting may hold within it many different walks, or trace a path through several seasons – these moments of repetition and connexion co-exist and interrupt in a dialogue with each other.
There is a sense of recognition in the repeated encounter with a particular place - a fence, a thicket, a slope - like meeting an old and familiar friend.
Lucinda Oestreicher studied at the Slade School of Art, Central School of Art and Bath Academy of Art.
Piers Ottey
Piers Ottey's paintings are instantly recognisable, with his trademark 'colour code' around the edge of paintings, drawing marks and even mistakes/overpainting are all to be seen in these seemingly simple works. He works from his studio in West Sussex, on the edge of the Downs.
Much of his work derives from visiting places at home and abroad. He has worked on images from the mountains of Switzerland to city paintings of San Francisco and London, where he was born and raised, but most often returns to paint the Sussex landscape.
The process of painting is important, but so is the form: these paintings are characterised by rigorous structure, using geometry as well as varying surface textures and finishes.
He says of Barlavington to Upwaltham Church, "This painting began with a walk from Barlavington church. It is painted from the top of the Downs where the sweep of the Upwaltham valley and Upwaltham Church just become visible. I have driven this bend for 53 years but had never seen the valley from this spot, nor look this beautiful. This field always looked massively productive in the Summer. I have repeated the gentle sweep of the valley with a mirrored shape in the sky and have used other motifs too. The pinks are helpful ‘leftovers’ from the painting underneath!"
Piers trained at Chelsea School of Art in the 1970’s and has been painting professionally ever since. He moved to West Sussex in 1980 and ran The Mill Studio Art School from 1994-2025. He now no longer teaches and concentrates fully on painting, which he does most days.
Piers Ottey has shown in many countries including Germany, Paris and London, and his work can be found in private, corporate and public collections around the world. In August 2022 Piers completed a major retrospective ‘Five Decades of Painting’ at Oxmarket Contemporary in his home county of West Sussex which was received with great acclaim.
Deborah Petch
Deborah’s work starts by sketching with ink, fondly known as ‘Inklings’ these small-scale ink drawings convey an immediate response to the landscape. They are an intuitive record of her journeying both physically and mentally and a record of her experience of being in the landscape at a particular moment in time.
Deborah works with natural materials, making her own inks from charcoal and gesso from chalk and rabbit skin glue. The natural gesso is applied to birch panels which she prepares meticulously to give a flat, smooth, skin-like surface that she then draws and paints on. The natural gesso made from chalk echo’s the chalky earth and paths of the Sussex landscape and the South Downs.
Producing art materials from the land is appropriate for this exhibition as here the land is not only giving the inspiration for the work but is also embedded within the piece of work itself. The ply panels she works on are dimensionally made to the golden ratio (1.618) to give harmonic balance to the painting, it is a ratio that recurs naturally in nature.
Her work is an immersive and experiential recollection of being in the landscape. Through her work, she hopes to evoke a sense of being in a place where many have been and trodden before her both past and present. She creates a palimpsest of marks in her paintings through layering, to echo the memories of what lies beneath, around and within a place.
Andrew Roberts
Andrew Robert’s rich and gestural paintings depict diverse landscapes across the UK and Europe. For Andrew due to his life long battle with Congenital Heart and Lung disease each work is a trial and a battle to experience the world as a beautiful entity. Painting plein-air a necessity to connect with the world in a positive way.
Mostly in square format, the works take on the physicality of their subjects through rich impasto surfaces, dynamic glazing techniques, and romantic, opulent palettes. They are highly evocative of the atmosphere of the landscape, captivating viewers and transporting them to another place and time.
East Clayton Farm, the subject of Andrew Roberts painting is the home of the Lorica Trust who in 2004 converted derelict farm buildings into supported living quarters for highly dependent young adults whose health needs mean they need 24/7 care. In addition the original farm house has been redeveloped into flats for adults moving on from homelessness who are supported and encouraged to engage in the running of the farm.
One of the newer projects that runs at the farm is supporting of young people from local schools who are in danger of exclusion and who are now developing self esteem confidence and self belief. As well as learning to better manage their anxieties and behaviours, all under tutelage from volunteers who offer intergenerational experience.
East Clayton Farm also hosts local dementia groups, teach hedge laying as part of their conservation project and have 8 bee hives run by volunteers to produce their own honey.
Local farms can graze their cattle on the small 120 acre farm in the South Downs National Park on land owned by the National Trust. The farm offers adoption of certain of its animals too! Such as the Donkeys.
For Andrew Roberts, the paintings provide direct associations with experiences, triggering memories about the context in which they were created; these experiences are often referenced in the anecdotal titles of respective works. Seemingly ambiguous, these titles offer intimate, literary narratives - a glimpse into the artist’s creative, and human experience. “The painting is all about the process, the finished product is just the wake of it”
Tiffany Robinson
Poignant places and questions lead Tiffany Robinson's practice to look beyond the tangible physical properties of place, of being, towards the imagination, the other-worldliness, of spirit.
She seeks places in nature that stimulate the senses to by-pass the rumblings of the mind; and goes to the forest to meet the shadow and the sacred; to experience deeply the dialogue with ‘other’ and record significant findings through drawing, writing, assemblage, and film.
Tiffany Robinson says of her submitted painting "Rape fields stand out like blocks of sunshine, as if an artist had coloured the fields in yellow with a roller. It is a taste prescribed not only in terms of beauty, but taste of the oil as one of the 'products'.
But what if we are a product of the decisions we make, including how we connect with the land? What if the illnesses associated with use of chemicals in farming are challenging us to rethink our relationship to the land, to our bodies, our growers, as well as notions of beauty and taste.
Our native ancestors would ask permission of the land, would ask for the help of the wind, the rain, and the sun. What if our farmers were given the freedom to ask permission not of governments, but of the land itself? What if we freed mechanised, industrial ways of thinking to systemic ones that reciprocated resources and valued community and nourishment for all?"
The enquiry focus can be a thought, or a feeling. Being charged with imagery and insight from soulful dialogues on walks, this then charges the materials and surfaces she works with in the studio.
The materials of place actively collaborate in the making of the work with water, chalk, charcoal, bone black pigment made from bones found on walks, gum-arabic, honey, plus other raw pigments. In loosening the grip of how the materials, tools, and ideas are integrated and applied to make the work, there is a looseness and a truth that emerges that becomes recognisable, that echoes and responds to the enquiry. The work seeks to put that out into the world to resonate something in your world, that opens a question or calls to the intangible in you through recognition.
Recent research funded by the Edward James Foundation extended Tiffany Robinson's practice to walking with ideas from the archive and collection on the West Dean woodland estate. The walks in the different woods sought a sensory understanding of place, but as this was shortly after the death of her mother the personal grief and growing awareness of transcendence – of the birth in the death – leaked into the work.
She says "There is a performative element in the acts of walking, acts of noticing, and acts of mark-making, which I bring into the process of making the work. Sometimes I invite others to join me through guided walks that encourage others to engage with their own enquiry."
Melanie Rose
Sussex cattle are one of England’s oldest breeds and were originally used as draught oxen which can be seen in the painting Red Oxen of Sussex by Dorothy Elder
In 1724 Daniel Defoe wrote in A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain:
That he saw trees drawn on timber-tug by twenty-two oxen, and that not far from Lewes he saw an ancient lady of good quality going to church in a country village, drawn in her coach by six oxen. This was not done, wrote Defoe, in frolic or humour, but sheer necessity, the ways being so deep and stiff that no horses could go on it (Sussex Cattle Society)
Melanie Rose says "Today these magnificent animals are being reintroduced to West Dean Estate as beef cattle and in November 2024 I was fortunate to be taken on a tour of the Estate where I was introduced to the Sussex herd on Buriton Farm.
The decision to move toward mixed farming was made not only through the farmers deep knowledge of the land but the estate’s ethos of locally produced, field to fork thinking.
Sustainable philosophies are at the heart of the West Dean Estate through tree planting to create woodland corridors to rich flower meadows, but it was the cattle that captured my heart and so on a chilly February day in 2025 I was driven out to Millpond Bottom (a location on the farm) where I spent the morning making field-sketches in preparation for what has become my Sussex Red series of paintings."
Melanie Rose is a painter exploring place. Exhibiting widely she has paintings held in both private and public collections.
She is a British Academy research scholar, having been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds.
Tania Rutland
Tania Rutland's work explores the balance between representation and abstraction. It is her continuing fascination with the anthropogenic landscape that spans the Sussex region, that inspires her landscape paintings.
She says "I explore the human activity that has shaped and exploited the land, from ancient agricultural practices to modern industrialisation, each epoch has left its mark, weaving a complex narrative of adaption and transformation across the Sussex countryside.
I endeavour to reflect the profound impact of our collective presence on the land. My paintings indicate a ‘humanized countryside’, where patterns and repetitions of tracks, paths, and abandoned remnants intertwine to create a multifaceted story of history and memory.
In my work, I explore the interplay between natural and human forces. Disused paths, broken fences and desire paths carved by both animals and people become central elements in my compositions.
The ever-changing weather and relentless movement of people over millennia have sculpted these landscapes, breathing life and history into them. It is this continuous transformation that inspires my art, capturing the beauty in the marks left behind.
The concepts behind my art is translated through artistic practise of oil painting, using the time-honoured ‘fat over lean’ technique. The surface is gradually built up using thin layers of paint, building depth. Each translucent layer contributes to a rich, luminous finish, capturing light and shadow.
I wish to create works that resonate with both historical tradition and contemporary sensitivity."
Kate Sherman
Kate Sherman grew up on the Jurassic coast of Dorset. After graduating with a degree in Fine Art she continued her painting practice while working in the London art scene, before deciding in 2005 to paint full time. She lives and works in Sussex.
She says of her submitted painting "Birch Spring is from a series I painted of a group of birch trees amongst brambles in a small area of woodland. I was drawn to the pattern & the light, the verticals dividing the picture plane, and the reduced palette of silvery greens and blues which held the eye. Up above, the tall birch swayed, and below, the mycorrhizal networks would be connecting roots and organisms; a wild place on the edge of farmland, unpeopled, where fungi thrive and biodiversity is abundant."
The paintings, all oil on panel, originate from photographs she has taken of her surrounding landscape. This photographic source is important because the paintings capture a reflective notion of memory, of the emotional distance between a real landscape and a photograph, between experience and longing.
It is a poignant and quiet melancholy reminiscent of Edward Hopper, that is expressed both by the portrayal of sparse unpopulated landscapes containing elemental traces of man, and by her restrained palette which is often suffused in a reserved northern European light of chalky blues and pink-blushed greys.
Catharine Somerville
Catharine Somerville was born in Toronto and works both in Sussex and Canada. Her work is a visual experience concerned with the observed world in arrays of light and colour.
After completing her diploma at Georgian College On Catharine went on to study printmaking at York University and later realized a BA Arts and Humanities (Art History) at the Open University. In 2009 she completed her postgraduate studies at West Dean College.
Major awards include “Iceberg” presented to The Gryphon Theatre Co, ON, The Chairman’s Prize, West Dean College/University of Sussex, UK and Best Architectural Feature, Arts Society King, ON.
Catharine Somerville's work can be found internationally in public, private and corporate collections in Mexico, the U.S.A, Canada and England including the Edward James Foundation, West Sussex and Las Pozas, Xilitla, YMCA Irma Brydson Place, Toronto, Kanata Research Park Corp., Ottawa, the Thomson Reuters Headquarters, Toronto and the Donald Wilson Neuro Rehabilitation Centre Chichester, West Sussex. Catharine regularly donates a painting to the Katie’s Lymphoedema fund yearly auction in London, UK.
She says “I am interested in the landscape’s sublime beauty, which for me offers contradictions and tensions between the unyielding and ephemeral ecospheres. Shifting light and mutable colours during the changing seasons and assorted places where I am currently working are my focus."
As a contemporary landscape painter Catharine Somerville considers all the arts such as poetry, dance and especially music in line with attempting to reach emotional responses that might connect a witness to the reality of a human experience. Her painting takes up the notion of landscape as a metaphor allowing her to make an artistic sense of the world by making marks and exploring colour in a post-impressionist/expressionist and abstract way.
While she has a firm studio practice, Catharine equally paints En Plein Air using various mediums from traditional oil and watercolour to exceptional mediums found in her prevailing environment. Her paintings take on an ephemeral lightness between the layers of pigments casting and bouncing light to provide jewel like colours on the backdrop of a sky, sea, lake or woods.
Phil Tyler
Different landscapes evoke different emotions in the artist Phil Tyler. Long vistas and heavy clouds of Sussex act are melancholic panoramas. The wood and its overgrown trees, act as shelters and places of contemplation.
Over the last three years Tyler has been working on a new series of paintings inspired by early morning or late evening light. In Cinema, this is described as the 'Golden Hour', being optimal for capturing a beautiful aesthetic on camera. This can also be called 'Liminal' as the threshold between two states, in this case light and dark.
The juxtaposition of warm and cool, light and dark as well as the broken colour filtering through the trees has inspired him to make numerous drawings, watercolours, and digital colour studies which hover between recollection and memory.
Phil Tyler trained in Fine Art at Loughborough College of Art and Design as well as Virginia Commonwealth University and completed his MA in Printmaking in Brighton in 1990, where he is currently course leader of BA Fine Art Printmaking
He has exhibited in the NEAC, ING Discerning Eye, Royal Institute of Oil Painters, The Lynn Painter-Stainers prize, The Garrick Milne Prize, The Royal Overseas league, East, The National Open and the Whitworth young contemporaries' competitions.
His work is in both public and private collections in this country as well as in America Australia Finland Hong Kong and Sweden, as well as Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, Peterborough Museum, University of Essex: Modern and Contemporary British Art Collection, Essex, Worthing Museum and Art Gallery, Yale Centre for British Art and the Priseman Seabrook Collection. He appeared on Sky Landscape Artist of the Year in 2017 and in Sky Portrait artist of the year in 2018 and 2019.
His first book Drawing and Painting the Nude was published by the Crowood Press in 2015. His second book, Drawing and Painting the Landscape was published in 2017, and his third book on Procreate Landscapes on the iPad is due to be published early July 2025.
Andy Waite
Andy Waite was born in the UK and studied graphic design at West Sussex College of Art and Design, graduating in 1977, LSIAD.
Though gathering visual inspiration from Europe, North Africa and Scotland, he has lived and worked in the West Sussex town of Arundel, surrounded by the South Downs for more than 40 years. He is represented by several galleries across the UK and has work in collections both nationally and internationally.
Andy Waite says of his submitted painting
"Meadows are a haven for a wide range of wildlife, providing crucial habitats for a variety of species, including pollinators like bees and butterflies as well as birds. My painting is a celebration of all the wonders and beauty contained in a meadow.
If you look carefully at the image you'll find the purple bordered gold moth, which is a rare moth usually found in boggy or marshland but occasionally in meadows."
Working and playing with the harmonics of colour and their nuanced resonances has been a life-long passion, driven by an irrepressible inner necessity. If natural forms are the archetypal structures giving his work its grammar, it is Andy Waite’s affinity with colour and the many unspoken, poetic languages and realms it conveys, that is central to the intuitive, expressive compositions. Lively, spontaneous, sometimes paint laden, sometimes dry, with wide brushstrokes, linear gestural motifs and colour balancing layers are added, scraped, scratched and worked into over several weeks.
Canvases are often left turned to the wall so as to see them afresh at each reworking. Gradually the alchemy of paint, the unconscious and the imagination, on the now textured and multilayered surface, reveals the hitherto unknown and unseen. The resulting work is only considered complete if the painting, now speaks to the poetry of places that reside in long lost and longed for imaginings.
Andy Waite has published three books of his paintings with accompanying poems and one book of his poems illustrated with black and white photographs. As a young adult emerging from a monotone, restrictive and archaic education into the liberating and vibrant cultural scene of the late 60’s and 70’s, he could finally begin to unfold and explore his innate artistry through music, poetry and painting, the mediums of each consistently influencing the other.
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