Contemporary Art, Furniture & Craft Gallery · Licensed Café
Clare Trenchard new ceramic sculpture and drawings
Binny Mathews new paintings of the sculptor’s studio
Saturday 17 January – 7 March 2026
Doors 6pm hot supper available from the bar.
Tickets: £11 from Sladers Yard t: 01308 459511
When successful portrait painter Binny Mathews had the idea of painting another artist at work, observing their most private creative moments and recreating the atmosphere of absolute concentration within the studio, she approached her friend the sculptor Clare Trenchard. Clare agreed for one month on condition there would be no talking and no lunching (they are both tremendous talkers and lunchers.) The arrangement continued for four transformational years.
Sculptor Clare Trenchard – whose spirited sculpture in bronze captures the essence of animals and wild hare-humans – gradually began to explore making human figures in ceramic inspired by Moroccan travellers and nomadic people in harsh landscapes. The electrifying ‘Representatives’ are taller than life-size with flapping robes, headdresses and undefined faraway faces. In maquette they are also a delight whether gathering in groups or single. Clare’s drawings revel in the distinctive humorous, decorative qualities of travellers on donkey, old women gossiping in the marketplace, figures in the dust and wind. While other drawings define the thrilling figures she has developed as sculpture.
Perhaps Binny invented the project to give herself room to work experimentally without trying to please an audience. As a portrait painter she works largely to commission and as a recently divorced woman, whose two adult sons are also both artists, she has felt the pressure to pay the bills. Encountering day after day the utterly unselfconscious, steady seriousness with which Clare works gave Binny the key to unlock the dedication with which she painted in her gifted twenties as she rose to high acclaim. Binny’s journey has been a freeing, a renewal and a reconnecting to the clarity of her voice. Allowing the way she lays on paint and her sense of colour, light and form to take over has produced paintings with a new energy and lightness. By treating the seemingly chaotic environment of the sculptor’s studio as an abstracted landscape, Binny’s paintings reveal the quiet beauty of the creative space.
To register your interest in either of the artists in the exhibition, for invitations and early information please contact us on gallery@sladersyard.co.uk.
