Venue
Venue Address
Cotmore Farm, Cotmore, Kingsbridge
Venue Postcode
TQ7 2LR
What3Words
paramedic.lizard.craters
Directions
From the A379 roundabout in Stokenham, follow signs to East Prawle and East Portlemouth. After a mile, you come down hill past Old Cotmore Farm on the right. Just after Old Cotmore Farm, take the first unmarked road on the right and follow until you reach the sign for Cotmore Farm at the bottom of the driveway.
Parking
Car park on site. Unsuitable for motor homes.
Venue Facilities
Artist statement
As an artist with a reflective perspective, I make work that aims for a subtle vitality. Paintings often begin from watercolour or acrylic transferred via glass, which creates a fluidity that gives an intuitive, unforced character. Weaving with words embeds the threads of stories found and lost.
Extended Bio
Having grown up within earshot of the surf in Cornwall, I’m a painter from the sea but not of it. After some years in Hertfordshire, where I exhibited regularly and taught workshops, I’ve now returned to the coast, where the colours of the sea and the effect of light falling through or onto a surface are themes I often return to.
When I came here to Cotmore Farm, it was always with new directions in mind. And for a decade and a half - together with my husband - I have been establishing and building (at times literally!) the multi-award-winning farm holiday complex that is Cotmore today. Alongside, I keep a family menagerie of rare breed animals, as well as riding and training horses.
At last, I have found time and space to return to painting, and my new work is invigorated by my unconventional evolution as an artist. Originally a zoologist, my PhD was in vertebrate palaeontology, using repurposed dental equipment to clean millions of years of rock from fossil bones. At Christ’s College, Cambridge, I studied in the very rooms occupied by the founder of evolutionary biology, Charles Darwin, author of ‘The Origin of Species’ and, here, I refined my drawing through meticulous illustrations to support the study of skeletons and musculature. I first entered the life studio at 18 and regularly return there today.
So years on, I open for the first time in Devon with inspiration from a lifetime of influences. The design and subject matter pay tribute to my love of medieval art and history, an homage to past masters who made icons, altarpieces and tapestries telling traditional stories including the Creation and the Flood. But, in style, my work is entirely contemporary - the pictures originate from layers of fluid pigment transferred from glass, giving an intuitive, unforced character.
My ‘Origins’ paintings depicting stories from Genesis evolve via an oil pastel tapestry of overlaid and interwoven words from the writings of Darwin himself. Another series illustrates Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tale’ in which Chaunticleer the cockerel uses his wits to escape a fox.
Playful and irreverent, my work has mischief and vitality drawn from close observation of animals and people and I am welcoming visitors to a farmyard workplace surrounded by my chickens, ducks, horses, sheep and pigs.
