Art for the environment at GroundWork Gallery

GroundWork Gallery in Purfleet Street, King’s Lynn is a gallery dedicated to art and the environment. Their ethos ‘art for the environment’ is imbued in their showcases and events. The gallery will re-open in March this year with an exciting program of events. 

The regular re-sewing studio centres around textile snippets and waste materials. The workshops invite participants to drop in and sew around the kitchen table. Sewers are invited to bring items that need ‘mending, stitching, remaking, refashioning’. The idea is that items that are sitting in the back of a cupboard can be repurposed, reused and recycled. 

“We visited Goundwork Gallery and found a wonderful exhibition about waste, intelligently curated with fascinating approaches to an environmental problem, the materials we use and throw away on a daily basis and what becomes of them. Take the trip, you’ll love this gallery, we can’t wait to see the next show. King’s Lynn is stunning too.”

Jane Langley, Founder of Blue Patch

The major theme this year is a series of events around ‘Art for the environment’. Inspired by the exhibition, Mary Blue will be hosting a weekend of painting for women at GroundWork Gallery in late March 2024. Paint-Studio: Visions of the Earth will centre around sharing ideas and images. The idea is to inspire making new works of art in response to our local environment. 

The exhibition will showcase works from emerging artists whose work draws attention to our fragile planet. The exhibition runs from March 16 to June 8. Each of the artists depicts work on environmental sustainability and biodiversity. Interconnections, issues like colonial violence and social justice, and ‘intra-actions’ are also themes. 

The artists this year include 

  • Sophie-Anna Gibbings is from California but now living in the UK. Sophie-Anna is a ‘regenerative artist working in collaboration with nature’. 
  • Nicholas Holt is a lens-based artist from the Peak District. His practice explores ‘meditated states in the landscape’. 
  • Lucy Jane MacAllister Dukes is a transdisciplinary artist and philosopher. Lucy’s work is exploring ‘how artistic practice can become “intra-actions”’. 
  • Eleni Maragaki is a visual artist born in Athens, Greece. Her ‘practice engages with the idea of geometry as a fundamental language’. 
  • Beth Robertson is a sound artist based in London and Glasgow. Her practice ‘traverses boundaries of sound, ecology and geography in an interdisciplinary investigation into the testimonies of the more-than-human’. 
  • Professor Lucy Orta’s visual arts practice ‘employs a diversity of media including drawing, sculpture and performance to realise major bodies of work that address key social and ecological challenges’. Lucy collaborates with her partner Jorge as Lucy + Jorge Orta. 

Lucy Orta launched the AER Art for the Environment international residency programme in 2015, with which this exhibition is in collaboration. GroundWork Gallery has been hosting an artist for a residency as part of the programme for the last three years. Applications for the 2024 residency are now open. 

The Ground Up Residency is now live for applications. The residency will run between July 15 and Aug 25, 2024 and focuses on Extraction* for the 4th year.

If your interests lie in anything to do with what we pull, dig, drill out of the earth or sea, what we do with it, what we ought to do about it and how we should be communicating more widely with more people about it, then apply. 

The residency includes a free exploratory fieldwork and learning programme. There are 3 different locations where you could be based: GroundWork Gallery in central King’s Lynn, The Grange Projects in Great Cressingham and Broomhill in Reepham.

Residencies are normally 2 weeks but can be longer in some cases by arrangement. 

No money changes hands but accommodation and working space is provided for free and the idea is to share, eat and talk together whenever possible. There is also a culminating show of work for the final 3 months of the year.

Applications

Application deadline 2 April 2024

Further details and application form are on the website: https://www.groundworkgallery.com/groundwork_projects/the-groundwork-residency-2024/

Related enquiries to mail@groundworkgallery.com 

To read more about the artists involved in Art for the Environment at GroundWork Gallery, visit their website: https://www.groundworkgallery.com/

* originally inspired by Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss an ambitious programme of exhibitions and interventions by the Codex Foundation in Montana in the United States in 2021.

Annette Clubley

Annette is a keen wildlife conservationist, mindful of sustainability and our impact on the environment. Outside of work, family is her focus and she loves teaching the next generation to enjoy the outdoors.