Sky Lines

Alex Lowery recent paintings and drawings

Lise Herud Braten studio pottery

Petter Southall furniture

Saturday 21 September – Sunday 3 November 2024

Sky Lines takes us out into the landscape, the rugged and the urban, the natural and the man-made.

Alex Lowery’s stunning new paintings of Portland and Lyme Bay (with Orkney, Greece and Sicily) introduce bright new colours and an upbeat mood. Many of us, who have followed his work over the years as he explores new ways of looking and painting, find ourselves seeing this much-loved coastline afresh through his eyes.

In her debut UK solo show, ceramicist Lise Herud Braten, a Norwegian rising star based in London, presents highly textured vessels and forms suffused with a sense of history, of time spent exposed and weathered by the natural elements.

She joins our resident Norwegian, Petter Southall, whose creations in wood bring a Scandinavian design sense and world-class craftsmanship to magnificent, sustainably grown, Northern European trees.

A master of light and line, Alex Lowery’s recent paintings develop his fascination with rooflines and planes of colour. Confident, unusual colour combinations feel deeply satisfying. While his paintings stem from observation, a process of reassembly, abbreviation and applying of accents transforms the everyday into poetry in paint.

Unpeopled, but full of the evidence of people, these intriguing paintings play in the mind. They are beautifully structured to take the eye on an exploratory route around and through the image, using contrasts from foreground to background, rough foliage and the flat planes of buildings to clear sea and sky. The contemporary is set against the infinite. Alex Lowery takes transitional edgy places and throws radiant light on them, drawing us into the image and pulling us back with a reminder that this is paint and all is illusion. Improvising and distilling the real places of today he finds and captures something exceptional.

Lise works with many different techniques, from delicately thin thrown vessels to roughly textured slabs of coarse clay. Using a variety of stoneware and porcelain clays, each piece is layered with slips, oxides, glazes and natural ash, applied in a painterly and abstract way and often fired several times. The resultant effect suffuses the piece with a sense of history, of time spent exposed and weathered by the natural elements. There is a sense of timelessness and quiet beauty deep within each piece.

Lise trained as a Bespoke Women’s Tailor in Norway and in the UK. She worked for several of London’s top couture designers before creating her own design label. She started learning to throw in 2013. Masterclasses with Shozo Michikawa, John Higgins and Hazel Richards helped develop her practice.

She has been exhibiting across the UK since 2017 and has been represented by Studio Tashtego in New York since 2021 and by Nickey Kehoe in LA since 2022. She became a Selected Member of the Craft Potters Association and of Contemporary Applied Arts in 2022. She has shown at Collect Art Fair with CAA, the Oxford Ceramics Fair, Celebrating Ceramics, Waterperry Gardens, Ceramic Art London, Ruthin Craft Centre and Cambridge Contemporary Art. Her work is held in private collections in Europe, USA, Asia and the Middle East.

Petter Southall is a master-craftsman in wood and an exceptional designer. The strong simple lines of his pieces look effortless and unique. Recently he has been making sculpture and constructions for gardens and outdoor spaces as well as continuing his long and distinguished career designing and making beautiful useful pieces of furniture.

His work is recognisable for its harmonious way of treating the wood, working mostly in solid stunning timber which is often steam-bent and completed with inspired detailing. Each piece is based on a deep knowledge of the wood anticipating how it will behave over the years.

Petter Southall trained as a traditional wooden boatbuilder in Norway and ran his own boatyard in Norway before studying cabinet making at the College of the Redwoods in Northern California followed by sustainable design with John Makepeace at Hooke Park College in Dorset. He set up his workshop in Dorset in 1991 and has recently moved to new premises at Denhay, north of Bridport. His showroom is Sladers Yard which he converted into the current gallery and café. He has made work for hospitals, public art commissions, public bodies, corporations and countless private collections, homes and businesses in UK, Europe and the US. He is delighted to undertake commissions large and small.

To register your interest in any of the artists in the exhibition, or any enquiries please contact us on gallery@sladersyard.co.uk.

Additional ceramics by Peter Hayes, Gabriele Koch, Fiamma Colonna Montagu, Adela Powell, Yo Thom, Sue Ure and Paul Wearing. Bronze sculpture by Clare Trenchard. Jewellery by Crystal Johnson. Textiles by Margo Selby and Wallace Sewell. Books, prints and accessories will also be constantly renewed.