The gallery opened in September 2017 to show sculptures and drawings by Dave King alongside works by guest artists. It is in rural East Devon between Axminster and Chard. See Contact page for directions.
After closing for two years for the pandemic the gallery reopened with Found, a show of work by Jacy Wall and Jenny Graham in a variety of media, primarily painting and textiles but also printmaking, photography, ceramics, alongside Dave King’s drawings and his clay and wood sculptures.
For Jacy and Jenny, the works give a sideways look at aspects of the landscapes where they live: Jacy on the West Dorset border overlooking the Axe Valley and Jenny in Burrowbridge on the Somerset Levels. Jacy’s exhibits included the ceramic sculpture above and Jenny’s paintings included Unknown Surface below.
This was followed by A Dinner-Gong in the Jungle, a display of small paintings, “hollow books” and illustrated books by Andrew Lanyon giving an insight into his take on today’s world and the past. The next exhibition, Sculptor’s Drawings, focuses on King’s drawings but also includes sculptures and prints.
The Shippon News has reviews of exhibitions by Alison Oldham, pictured above at the Royal Academy with Fruit, Antony Gormley’s sculpture whose materials are described as cast iron and air. She was the Research Fellow of Falmouth College of Art/Tate St Ives and art correspondent of Oracle teletext and the Ham & High. Most reviews focus on a work of art she’d like to take home. It begins with a review of Brian Rice’s exhibition Red, Black and White at the Close gallery in Somerset.
The Shippon News continues with a review of an exhibition by Basil Beattie RA and Frances Aviva Blane which was online and at Burgh House, Hampstead in the spring of 2022. This is followed by a review of The Language of Colour – paintings and collages by Devon-based painters Patrick Jones and Nigel Moores which was at the Sou’-Sou’-West Arts Gallery near Bridport in November. Then comes Heath, Moor and Water – a celebration by Jenny Blake and Martin Atkinson which was in Hampstead last autumn, Leon Kossoff’s retrospective A Life in Painting at Annely Juda in London, a book about painter Frances Aviva Blane, and Landscape Portrait: Now and Then at the Hestercombe Gallery near Taunton.
These are followed by a piece on Dorset Art Weeks with reviews of open studios including Jacy Wall (textile above), then Philippa Abrahams’s account of re-creating Botticelli’s Young Man Holding a Roundel. Next is a review of Both Keen, a collaborative exhibition by Natalka Liber Stephenson and Florence Shaw in an unusual space in Bermondsey. This is followed by information on Frances Aviva Blane’s participation in Fragmented, a joint exhibition with ceramicist Claudia Clare at the Zuleika Gallery, London, plus reviews of the book FAB, with text by Susie Orbach, and an exhibition staged in 2018 Broken Heads Broken Paint.
A review of Brian Rice: 60 Years of Paintings and Prints which was at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter and the Museum of Somerset in Taunton is followed by information on Patrick Jones’ home exhibitions in Budleigh Salterton and an account of Chris Orr’s talk at the Ilminster Literary Festival on his illustrated book The Miserable Life of Fabulous Artists.
The reviews continue with Into the Night at the Barbican Art Gallery followed by Helene Schjerfbeck at the Royal Academy, Vuillard: The Poetry of the Everyday at the Holburne Museum, Bath, Lee Krasner’s Living Colour at the Barbican Art Gallery, The World As Yet Unseen: Women Artists in Conversation with Partou Zia at Falmouth Art Gallery, On Paper at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery in Honiton, Albert Irvin and Abstract Expressionism at the Royal West of England Academy, Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-garde at the Barbican in London, and 50 Years, 50 Artists at Annely Juda Fine Art in London.
Also included are Virginia Woolf: An exhibition Inspired by her Writings, most recently at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, then of Trail@14 at the Devon Guild of Craftsmen’s Riverside Gallery in Bovey Tracey, the Royal West of England Academy’s 166th Annual Open, and an exhibition of prints in Budleigh Salterton – Looking For Jeffery Edwards, Frances Aviva Blane’s Broken Heads Broken Paint and Howard Hodgkin’s Last Paintings, both in London, and several Westcountry shows: Sculpture @ The Walled Garden in Moreton, Dorset (below), Jane Hedges, Chris Dunseath and Jacy Wall in Dorset Art Weeks 2018, Kate Westbrook’s Diana and Actaeon at The Malthouse Gallery in Lyme Regis and David Haughton in St Just at Penlee House, Penzance.
Shippon Gallery 