Contemporary Art, Furniture & Craft Gallery · Licensed Café
Marzia Colonna MRBS collages
Fiamma Colonna Montagu ceramic sculpture
Petter Southall furniture
20 September – 8 November 2025
Two remarkable artists, Marzia Colonna and Fiamma Colonna Montagu, mother and daughter, will be exhibiting their harmonious and yet utterly individual and irresistible collages and sculptures alongside Petter Southall’s stunning furniture at Sladers Yard gallery, Bridport, from 20 September 2025.
The title ‘As Dreams are made on’ refers to Shakespeare’s idea that life is an illusion, made up of dreams, fragments and memories. In this exhibition the artists are showing work which carries the quality of dreams, works resonant of deep sensory impressions and memories of colours and textures in nature.
All three artists have completed large scale commissions and projects in the USA, Europe and the UK and have work in important collections internationally. ‘As Dreams are Made on’ is a celebration of the wonders of life.
MARZIA COLONNA builds up her collages from paper she has painted in advance, creating a vocabulary of colour and line that she combines to offer a personal vision of the land and sea around her Dorset home, the places she visits, interiors of her studio, flowers from her garden, her sculpture. She has a sculptor’s sense of form and texture, to which she adds a highly developed sense of colour, bringing together bright and earth colours in original and deeply satisfying combinations.
FIAMMA COLONNA MONTAGU makes sculptures in ceramic, from massive site-specific commissions to smaller sculptures, maquettes and vessels.
Her series of ‘Portals’ are circular structures, up to 3m in diameter which appear in the landscape like floating gateways, and her ‘Meditation Totems’, tall totemic forms often sited in groups creating a space within or beyond. Smaller sculptural maquettes are created for interiors, conveying monumentality beyond their scale.
In all the sculpture, metal armatures are threaded with textured, scored and shaped discs and elemental forms. Each piece combines different clays, from soft white and black porcelain to hard edged and gritty black and buff stoneware – to create a unique sculptural language. The result is a series of sculptures which feel ancient and contemporary at the same time.
As the artist describes, ‘weathering of the clay, lines, tracings and gesture all record the passage of time and serve as an attempt to convey the monumentality of our experience of this earth and our fragility alongside it’.
Petter Southall has been making his distinctive furniture, and more recently architectural and sculptural pieces, in Dorset since 1989. He combines traditional Norwegian wooden boatbuilding with highly skilled cabinetmaking techniques to create work that looks simple and entirely original. A group of his exceptional pieces is on permanent display at Sladers Yard. To this he adds works which he makes to explore new ideas. These pieces are for sale in the gallery. A recent workshop move to Denhay northwest of Bridport has opened a new chapter in his career and new thoughts about bringing wood into people’s lives in interesting, ethical and life-enhancing works.
To register your interest in any of the artists in the exhibition, or any enquiries please contact us on gallery@sladersyard.co.uk.
