In my paintings, I weave together words, symbols, and images, hoping to evoke empathy in those who engage with them. If they approach with an open mind, I hope they can trace the emotional currents that led me to create — leading us toward a shared experience grounded in the theory of the collective unconscious”.

This exhibition took place Jan 16 - Mar 12 2025

Both artists have a shared passion for capturing the natural world, in particular the British Isles which they call home. Whether that be the rolling pastoral hills or the wild rocky coastlines; there is beauty to be found in each corner.

Katy Harrald is a traditional pencil artist and illustrator based in Dorset specialising in highly detailed and expressive wildlife artworks. She was raised in the New Forest and along the South Coast. As such, her work has evolved naturally to become a celebration of British nature and coastal treasures.

Robin Mackenzie is an illustrator and printmaker specialising in the crafts of linocut and wood engraving. He graduated from the Art University Bournemouth in 2013 and has since gone on to create prints for The National Trust, The BBC, Ardbeg Whiskey, SAGA cruises and many others.

She studied Art at Leicester Polytechnic for a BA (Hons) in Graphic Design and Illustration (in a pre-digital age). This led to a move to London and a job as a graphic design assistant at BBC TV, where she used traditional methods of animation and story-boarding. Later, she adapted to the new computer tools and embarked upon a career as a freelance computer graphics designer.

"My love of Cinema began at an early age and I first began drawing from film at Art College from our rented b/w tv! Having access to my favourite films in my living room was exciting and I began a practice of drawing very fast in an effort to capture the essence of both the characters and the drama!"

In 2022, she joined an online course of weekly 3 hour sessions with The Royal Drawing School, where films are paused for 4-6 minutes on a chosen still. These paintings have been selected from work in those sessions.

Her work attempts to capture and control via marks, repetition, detail, endurance, scale, intricacy and numeracy. Drawings are documents and archives of time, with data also collated and recorded in journals as artefacts and archaeology of time.

She hopes to engage the viewer with nature as she experiences it, basing much of her work on drawing and painting on location throughout the year.

This collection of paintings is inspired by the unique Purbeck landscape, all of which are within a 20 mile radius from Swanage. Each painting is based on her experience whilst walking in nature. Drawing on location is an essential part of her painting practice, which she then translates into bigger work in her studio. Her focus is to capture the atmosphere of a place through colour and texture, and use the fluidity and vibrancy of watercolour to add a sense of movement and light to a landscape. The original paintings on display are for sale, and prints of any paintings are available on request - please contact Jessamy at jessamyhawke@gmail.com If you would like to see more of her work, visit her website at www.jessamyhawke.co.uk and follow her on Instagram @jessamydrewthat

The aim of the exhibition is to show the abundance of ongoing creative visual arts practice in the region. The exhibition will feature work in a wide range of media and is staged to coincide with Dorset and Purbeck Art Weeks. Work was displayed in the first floor gallery area and also for the first time in the exhibition area in the newly refurbished Studio.

Previous to this, she worked with textiles and interiors for 20 years. Clare is also a member of The Choreography of Trust, an international drawing collective, who held a residency and exhibition together in Chilliwack BC, Canada, in October 2023. This summer, will bring another group show, in Oxford, with Drawing Matters, the Drawing Research group from Arts University Bournemouth, in response to The Pitt Rivers Collection.

“Gathering In”

Gathering and seasonal collecting has always been at the root of Clare’s practice. Season or site specific, she responds to an amount of material gathered. Usually ephemeral structures, which might notionally prop, contain or support. This twisting, binding and emergent use of materials, expresses a visual outcome of making sense of something or just following that human desire to quietly create.

She starts work openly with lots of surplus natural materials and then a very stripped back outcome emerges. It’s a sculptural process; locate, gather, prepare, construct, re-construct and reduce. Balance rather than symmetry, is present in her work, an attempt to create order from all the fragmented parts.

Recently she has become interested in the wider relational framework of her making. A true reflection of her current practice, would be that it is messily muddled in her life and workshop. Many artists crave separation, time to think and create, but how does this fit with multiple roles in life, constant, modern interruption and a relationship to time? This exploration into single and collective authorship, is a continuation of her earlier project, “Interwoven” and her workshop at The Lantern Community, where many hands, thinking through foraged materials together, create something quite extraordinary. A collective experience. Mine, not mine.

Vivid colours fill his paintings, and he considers the symbolism of a colour scheme before mixing his palettes. He mixes 2- 7 palettes for each painting and uses oils and acrylics, sometimes utilizing the distinctive effects of fluorescent and metallic pigments. He hopes the detail of each painting means the viewer almost feels they could walk into a painting to discover its story.

Josh Hollingshead visited Madagascar in 2009 and has finally almost finished a series of paintings of the country. The extremely varied culture and landscape of Madagascar are displayed in this series, from rainforest, to the rice paddies and red soil of the Haute Plateau, to the plains of the South West. The Famadihana ceremony is portrayed in which a family disinters the ancestors’ remains from their tomb every 7 years, separates the remains, wraps them in fresh shrouds, and dances around the village with them. This unique ritual connects Malagasy people with generations past.

This exhibition took place from 9 February – 2 April 2024

As a working mum in arts education, with only snippets of time and a workspace carved out from the domestic environment, working with textiles was a way of maintaining her creative practice over the years.

After lockdown, following the loss of her mother and a research residency with Seam Collective for the Holburne Museum Bath, her focus turned inwards away from the local landscape that has been her inspiration.

Themes and ideas of belonging and kinship and the connection between generations became the undercurrents for a new body of work.

Spontaneously collaging motifs from patterned fabrics, used threads, found materials, texts and photography into mini quilt figures, comical or surreal themes emerged that convey ideas about female identity and the shape of community. How we are ‘cut from the same cloth’ though may seem distinctly ‘different’.

She has gone on to consider the ties of friendship, sisterhood and some significant life events in Swanage. The collection of figures continues to grow to encompass a wider ‘family’ community.

This exhibition took place from 15 December 2023 – 6 February 2024

The title “New Worlds” refers to both the contexts for the images and his move from London to Dorset 6 years ago. He sees his new location as a major positive influence on his creative practice. As well as working in Art departments in contexts such as animation, music video and adverts he has a passion for Film and has produced and directed 4 short films. Lewis has worked as a concept artist on many major productions of international stature such as His Dark Materials (BBC), Bridgerton (Netflix), Dracula (BBC) and most recently House of the Dragon (HBO).

For his exhibition at Mowlem he will present 5 large scale digital prints of forms that contain elements of creatures, space architecture and the archaeology of ancient civilisations. They unsettle the viewer through their complex weaving together of different times and spaces.

This exhibition took place between October 20th – December 12th 2023.

Historically Paul’s work has appeared at Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge) and in the Landscape Photographer of the Year show. More recently his work has been shown at Sandy Hill Arts (Corfe), the RWA Photography Open show and the Black Swan Open in Frome. 

This exhibition took place between 1 September – 17 October 2023.

This exhibition is timed to coincide with the 32nd Swanage Jazz Festival. The relationship between Jazz and painting goes back a long way, from Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43), through Jackson Pollock to Jean Michel Basquiat. As for Jim Hunter, Jazz Music is a very common “go to” as studio background music. It just seems to inspire! We can point to common terms used to describe both forms such as rhythm, space, tone, shape, interval, arrangement, fusion, improvisation as further evidence of this symbiosis.

Jim Hunter lives in Swanage and retired from his career in art education as Professor Emeritus of Painting at the Arts University Bournemouth. In 2018 he was elected a full Member of the Royal Watercolour Society and he serves currently as the Society’s Senior Vice President.

This exhibition took place between 7 July – 29 August 2023.

“A vision of silk turbans, brash brooches and bold ballgowns. Suzy has always had an eye for colour and beauty. She is happiest when stitching, buried under a pile of threads, calico and drawings”.

This mini series on display at Mowlem titled ‘Family’ comes from her marriage last year.

All through her life she has painted her family members and friends and it was extremely important for her to do the same when she got married. She has painted her mother, father and sister in law and her husband, and was excited to capture their expressions and bring these large scale portraits to life.

This exhibition took place from 26 May - 4 July 2023

Both nature and humanity are in constant flux of movement and change. As a means to embody this state, she immersed herself in the ephemeral nature of light and the sea, drawing with the traces that they momentarily declare in the physical world. The outcome is a visual drawing, although her experience is multi-sensory; sound, taste, touch and sight combined.

This exhibition took place from 24 March - 23 May 2023

New learnings about Geology only deepened this fascination. She is continually looking for information other than the obviously pictorial. It is the rocks, and their shapes, that interest her, together with the colours and their histories. Her aim is to express the seemingly permanent, affected by an accelerating erosion.

This exhibition took place from 27 January – 21 March 2023

You’ll recognise local performers in this exhibition of dozens of drawings, or perhaps you were in the show yourself! Drop in and be transported across the years through the power of the pencil…

Find out more about Tony and explore his work on his website: https://www.tonykerins.com/

This exhibition took place from 2 December 2022 –  25 January 2023

As a child, I was often taken to visit my Auntie Grace and Uncle Skylark, a local master stonemason and poet, at their home in Portland.  Memories of them are filled with romance and a steadfast relationship that lasted even into their later years.

It was, however, on an occasion when Uncle Sky gave me a typed copy of a poem he had written, that I was shown a darker and
deeply thoughtful side I wasn’t previously aware of. I have kept that poem for over fifty years and finding it again recently gave me the
inspiration to finally commemorate them through my art, as I’d always wanted.

In this series I have drawn upon many conversations with my Auntie Grace and Uncle Skylark, their love for each other and their love of Portland and its landscape.

The technique I have used goes under the skin of the photograph by including text taken from Skylarks’ poems and writings by Grace,
tying together and augmenting the connection between my work and theirs.

Helen Hardy 2022

This exhibition took place from 21 October - 29 November 2022