The Mummers Parade – detail. Marion Elliot

Marion Elliot co-curates our winter exhibition. Online from Midday, Friday 25th November.

This exhibition features selected artists whose work celebrates the ordinary and the extraordinary through the observation and interpretation of daily life, memory, storytelling, rituals and folklore. Using skills in ceramics, illustration, sculpture, and textiles, the artists explore the arenas of theatre, the circus, surrealism, winter and bringing good cheer!

The Mummer’s Gloves. Collage. 29.7 x 42cm

Marion Elliot

“I am a designer and printmaker who works mainly in paper. I love using printmaking techniques to produce densely textured papers to use in my collage work.

I have a great love of Folk and Vernacular/Popular art. I love shop fronts, fairgrounds, hand painted signage, advertising imagery and typography, tattoos, workers guild banners, mottos, religious iconography and paper ephemera. I am especially happy to have collaborated recently with the publisher Joe Pearson of Design For Today, on a book about the joy of the Circus.

I started my career in London and worked as a writer, stylist and art director for clients including F&W Media, David and Charles, Hachette, Hallmark, IPC Magazines, National Magazines etc. I have published 25 books on design subjects, including paper engineering and textiles.”

Marion Elliot 

November 2022

“I was born in London UK.
I studied at the Royal College here in London and this is where I’m based. I paint and draw for myself and to commission.
I’ve just completed an animation project with Sherbet in London and Fountain Digital, Moscow.
Now I’m working on a European songbook with Carus in Stuttgart and have just begun a new book project for Andersen Press in London.
The book, my 3rd for the publisher is about a bus journey in Burkino Faso.
I’m teaching at Goldsmiths in London and sometimes at West Dean College in West Sussex.”

Christopher Corr

Monsieur Frost. Gouache on paper. 

Christopher Corr

Splosh. 3D construction. 16 x 16.5cm

Irving Peacock

Irvine Peacock’s recent work is based on ephemera and popular culture. It explores the play-off between words and images by combining imagery, typography, construction and assemblage.
An established visual artist, his paintings are in numerous private collections in the UK and abroad. Predominantly a painter, he has also worked extensively in illustration, advertising and higher education. Irving lives and works in Shrewsbury.

Jims work draws on our legends and the figures and faces that populate our stories and imaginations both concious and unconcious, popular and forgotten.
After studying Theatre Design and Illustration, he worked as an Illustrator for many years. Over time this illustrative work began to morph into three dimensional pieces. Using mostly found and recycled resources, the works are mixed media and papier-mâché.
They are bold, colourful and playful, full of intrigue, humour and mystery.The aim is to create something magical from a variety of materials that may be dis- covered in skips and bins up and down the country, to create something valued from redirected landfill.
His work is powerfully influenced by the stories, pictures, films and children’s television of his Cotswold childhood in the 1970s.
As an artist in residence at Prema Arts in Uley he has been exploring further and creating larger pieces pushing further into those tall tales
from our past, discovering new faces and old characters.

John Blanke, The King’s Trumpeter.  Papier Mâché 64 x 62 x 8cm

Jim Pilston

Northumberland Folk. Painted enamel plate. 21 x 21cm

Jonny Hannah

Jonny Hannah is an illustrator & printmaker.
He studied Illustration at The Cowdenbeath College of Knowledge, Liverpool Art School & The Royal College of Art. Since 1998, he has been a freelance Illustrator, working for a huge variety of clients, including The New York Times, Penguin Books, Vogue & The St. Kilda Courier.
He collaborated with the celebrated animator Jonathan Hodgson on a short film for Channel 4 TV, called ‘The Man with the Beautiful Eyes’, which went on to win numerous awards, including the animation BAFTA in 2000.
In his few spare moments, he can often be found in the Cakes & Ale Press HQ, a shed in his Shirley garden. There, he paints, makes books, designs poster & generally makes a mess. His various exhibitions over the years & years have included ‘Main Street’ at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2015, & ‘Northumberland Folk’ – four (that’s right, four) exhibitions across museums in the North-East, including Woodhorn Museum, just as we crept out of out lockdowns in 2021

Richard Bawden is a painter and printmaker. He is also a designer, whose work includes; book illustration, posters ,murals, mosaics, textiles, engraved glass, furniture and cast iron seats (for which he cut the patterns himself)

He is an active member of the Royal Watercolour Society, the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, and the New English Art Club and a former Chairman of Gainsborough’s House Print Workshop in Sudbury.

His paintings are drawn from life, and as a printmaker he works predominantly in etching and lino. He is attracted by atmosphere, oddity, pattern and the strangely austere, which he finds in the world around him.

Born in 1936, he studied painting, printmaking and graphic design at Chelsea,

St Martin’s and the Royal College of Art.

Two Cats. Etching. 18/85

Richard Bawden.