Galleries - July 2013

Vanessa Gardiner and Malcolm Ashman. One of the artistic hotspots of Dorset is the area around Bridport. SladersYard has built up a reputation for innovative and thoughtful exhibitions (Alex Lowery, Richard Batterham and Petter Southall making a delicious trio this month) and Artwave West uses its stylish premises to good effect to promote artists exploring ‘the discourse between abstraction and figuration’. Boo Mallinson flies solo till 6th July, when she is joined by the rest of the gallery’s artists in what should be a dynamic summer show. Local resident John Hubbard meanwhile demonstrates the power of vine charcoal in his Deluge Drawings at The Art Room , Topsham, alongside the exquisite porcelain moon jars of Adam Buick. East Devon boasts the Brook Gallery at Budleigh Salterton (their ‘Made in Britain’ show features Chris Orr plus work by Piper, Blake, Ackroyd and others) and the Marine House at Beer – nothing to do with the underrated painter/printmaker Richard Beer, b.1928, but surely the obvious place for an exhibition of his work. This month they have a joint show by Mary Pym and Shirley Trevena. Closer towards the strange land that is Cornwall, lies Totnes, nominated by Jonathan Dimbleby as ‘my kind of town’. White Space Art keeps the flag flying here for everything that isn’t ‘brutish and brash’ (Dimbleby’s verdict on his least favourite town, Moscow), their Summer Exhibition opening on 20th July. Bath’s bo.lee gallery is upsticksing and moving to London, Islington to be precise, ceding its premises in the city of hot springs to the Quercus Gallery . Stocking a wide range of paintings, prints, collage, jewellery, ceramics and textiles, it will be interesting to see what niche this new venue carves out for itself. Bath is the largest town- planning exercise in England to be recognised by UNESCO as a creative masterpiece: no wonder galleries tend to flourish among its ‘Queen Anne fronts and Mary- Anne backs’. Sarah Drury something of a feature in Cornwall: The New Gallery in Porthscatho is the showcase for a loose amalgamation of artists working around the balmy Roseland peninsula and includes such notables as Eric Ward, Rod Walker and Alice Mumford, while at the Padstow Studio Sarah Adams miraculously combines work on her remarkable studies of cliffs and sea shore whilst ‘tending the shop’. In Penzance too, both the Alverton and New Street galleries are artists-run, producing a wide and lively selection of work, while at the newly opened Redwing the emphasis is on ‘outsider art’ and if you’re not quite sure what that is pop in and see – a chat over coffee will elucidate. Pip Palmer West Country Many people recall Bournemouth as the inspiration for the young Lawrence Durrell’s outburst: ‘I can’t be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of doom and eucalyptus . . . Why don’t we pack up and go to Greece?’ Much has changed since the ’30s and there is now plenty to feed the creative spirit in this south coast town. The ARThouse Gallery , for instance, has teamed up with the venerable Russell-Cotes to show work by its artists in the museum’s Café Gallery – this month four landscape painters will be on view, among them 19. GALLERIES JULY 13 H enrietta Dubrey ‘Bather’ 2013, oil on canvas at Belgrave St Ives. Neil Davies ‘From the Shoreline, Priest Cove’ at New Craftsman Gallery. Nick Bodimeade ’Water’s Edge VII’ 106.5 x 122 cm, oil on linen at Porthminster Gallery. Chris Barnes Stoneware Bowl, 27 x 12cm at White Space Gallery. Claire Moynihan Detail from Hornet Ball, 3d embroidery at Marle Gallery