‘Found in the Fields’ by Carry Akroyd and New ceramics by Richard Phethean

Carry Akroyd describes her first contact with the poems of John Clare as someone speaking directly to her and her experience of living in the Northamptonshire countryside:  ‘His eye, mind and heart reach across time in his writing’.

Over the past 25 years Carry has been creating paintings and prints that reflect and react to the sudden agricultural modernisations that have transformed our landscape. Some of her images are a lament while others express the sheer joy derived from the natural world. These colourful hand drawn images all contain some of Clare’s text; they reflect the landscape of today with roads, pylons, planes and wind farms, but also reveal how the natural world exists alongside us.

Richard Phethean’s work has grown out of domestic ware and has become more sculptural in the last ten years. His new work has been partially inspired by the exploration of planes and surface seen in the cubist work of Braque and Picasso that depict the abstraction of ordinary domestic objects such as jugs and vases. He also draws on the ceramic traditions of English country slipware and ancient Minoan ceramics.  He throws and alters these sculptural forms in course textured terracotta and decorates using layers of brushed clay slip and hand cut paper stencils.

Curated by Miranda Leonard of the restless gallery