The Need to Dream promises to be a mid-summer delight. David Inshaw, Henrietta Hoyer Millar and Marie-Claire Hamon, three intensely romantic and poetic painters each treating the English landscape in their own hugely accomplished individual style. These combine beautifully with the restraint, discipline and sophistication of Petter Southall’Äôs furniture and Claudia Lis’Äô ceramics in the atmospheric setting of the harbour-side Georgian warehouse, Sladers Yard.

Henrietta Hoyer Millar’Äôs oil paintings may be small in scale but they capture wide horizons. Her work revolves around the places she loves and knows best, the trees, hills and clearings around her studio at Shipton Gorge near Bridport, and those in Scotland where she grew up. She finds a place between reality, dream and memory and paints the familiar as it transforms into something beyond. Her rich and irresistible colours are scored, smeared and scratched into texture and depth. She works with her fingers, or brushes or anything she may seize in the moment to create the effects she wants. Henrietta has been working seriously as an artist ever since she graduated from City and Guilds in 1986 and since 1995 she has been with Long and Ryle in London. Her work has been commissioned and collected by institutions and collectors in London and beyond.

Marie-Claire Hamon’Äôs haunting landscapes have an exquisite abstract quality and large scale reminiscent of Peter Doig. They seem to represent actual places that are recognisable to the viewer. In fact they are assemblages of elements of local places, photographs she has taken, views she has seen. She often sets her delicate images in vast spaces to convey a notion of solitude, vulnerability and timelessness. In the paintings for The Need to Dream she has used the landscape to evoke ideas about a search or dream, the constant hope that beyond the horizon lies a promised land. She uses the landscape for its imaginary qualities. It often appears as a backdrop where human trace can be observed. The setting suggests ideas about the transience of modern communities, the unsettling shifts in human activity and cultural transitions while alluding to a sense of vast and foreboding spaces.

Originally from Belgium, and educated there and in France and Switzerland, Marie-Claire Hamon lives near Redruth in Cornwall’Äôs deprived rural interior where her paintings are set. She graduated from Falmouth College of Art in 1999 and has been working as an artist ever since, her intensely poetic voice developing in strength and confidence all the time.

Every year David Inshaw joins a team of poets and writers to play cricket at the magical grounds at Little Bredy, near Bridport, which David has immortalised in his three famous paintings entitled The Cricket Game I, II and III. This year, David has returned to the theme producing etchings which capture the mysterious beauty which is the essence of both cricket and the English landscape. Sladers Yard is delighted to show them alongside one of the original The Cricket Game paintings. Reasonably priced numbered etchings and high quality Giclˆ© prints of the paintings will be available.

The etchings and poems by other members of the team, Kit Wright, Neil Rollinson and Simon Rae, are to be printed into an artists’Äô book with an introduction by Alex Martin. The book will be printed and published by Giorgio Upiglio, one of Itlay’Äôs most renowned fine art printers, who has worked with a host of great names including De Chirico, Giacometti, Gunter Grass and Renato Guttuso. There will be a reading by the authors and talk by the artist on Thursday, 19 June at 7.30pm. Tickets at ¬£7.50 are available from Sladers Yard.

Never the strong and silent type of Scandinavian, Petter Southall’Äôs eloquent furniture takes the lines of geometry and turns them on their head. He fans out straight battens and makes them seem to curve. He turns massive boards into rings which he stacks and cuts in half to show the inside space. His benches are supported by great rings of solid oak, the overlap just the right height for an armrest with a flat for your cup of tea. Spaced slats of oak suggest scale and weight but let the light through and work like tracery in a church. His new Sleigh Bench looks as if it should have bells and reindeer to pull it, shake the reins and off you go.

Petter set up the i tre furniture studio at Chilcombe in West Dorset in 1991 and has been making his one-off and small batch furniture to commission and for exhibition ever since. The instigator and designer of Sladers Yard, Petter was educated all over the world but returned to his native Norway to apprentice as a wooden boat builder age 17. He has worked wood all his life, studying cabinet making with James Krenov in California and sustainable design in wood with John Makepeace in Dorset. He makes furniture for private houses, public and corporate spaces, indoors and out.

Claudia Lis’Äô ceramics are primarily wheel-thrown in small batches using porcelain or white stoneware. She develops her own glazes through an ongoing process of experimentation and testing. Currently, she is working with a range of iron-rich glazes called celadons that need to be gas-fired in order to develop their soft green colours. The random character of strongly contrasting rust implants emphasises the precise and clean profiles of the pieces. She presents her work in groups of related forms and subtle variations of colour creating a still-life effect with her displays.

Claudia was a ceramics apprentice in Germany and subsequently worked for seven years with British ceramicist Rupert Spira. Since the launch of her own studio in 2004, she has exhibited widely throughout this country and internationally.

Cricket at Little Bredy Poetry Reading and Talk with David Inshaw, Kit Wright, Rollinson and Simon Rae is on Thursday, 19th June at 7.30pm. Tickets at £7.50 are available from Sladers Yard.

Sladers Yard, West Bay, Bridport, Dorset DT6 4EL T: 01308 459511
Open 10 ’Äì 5pm Wednesday to Saturday, 11 ’Äì 5pm Sunday & BH Mon
www.sladersyard.co.uk
info@itrefurniture.co.uk

Petter Southall's showroom with Philosophy - Julian Bailey, Derek Nice and Petter Southall - West Bay - Beatitudes featuring Cheryl Campbell - Miranda Creswell's paintings and drawings - West Bay - Beatitudes by David Inshaw - Alfred Stockham, Miranda Creswell and Petter Southall - Out to Sea - Bailey Nice and Southall - The Need to Dream - Vanessa Gardiner - Tim Nicholson - Sladers Yard Christmas Show - Robin Rae