The Internal Landscape

Tuëma Pattie

This exhibition focuses on key pieces from different moments in Tuëma Pattie’s life, identifying the “Pattie Palette”, and revealing how her use of colour can be traced from one work to another, across many years, reflecting joyous light moments and also the dark ones, warm and cool tones conveying her responses. As she reminds us, “Everyone has dark moments in their life, it’s how you face them”. The works reveal an honesty in her approach to painting..

Sketch books are key. Drawings, first in pencil, latterly with paint, become notes to refer back to when stuck shared now as smaller works on card revealing her thought process, capturing moments in colour as a visual journal.

“Don’t deny your accidents. Painting is largely about knowing when to stop. My most recent piece “Poppies”, is right slap up to date (June 2022). I was ready, I had already painted the first layer, so it was dry. It was in the back of my mind, when my poppies come out, I will paint them.”

This is a work capturing the joy of Tuëma’s expression in paint, using her brushes to create a painting with freshness and vitality. She’s clearly an expressive colourist. As she tells me, “Painting- it’s all about how you handle your brush strokes.“

By the end of the exhibition, we return to her special, almost hidden, rural landscape on the north side of the Downs, close to Petworth, where can be found the long views, the glowing shafts of evening light, the Rother Valley with it’s corners of lush, wet grasses, steep damp banks, narrow ancient lanes, dense chestnut coppices and mixed oak woodland, somewhat at odds with the sandy stretches of crisp, dry, open heathland that intersect this area. It's where we began, with Tuema enjoying her latest work of poppies from her colourful garden at home, and we are reminded by her to notice and appreciate all that is around us

“How beautiful the landscape is in this corner of Sussex. One sees magical things. Sunsets are fabulous and the skies have been extraordinary.. There’s no shortage of things to paint, living here".

Lucy Hodgson, June 2022

See short biography

Katharine Swailes

The Colourfield tapestries in this exhibition reflect an inner self and the geographical place I inhabit.

As a tapestry weaver I am part of a tradition that reaches back thousands of years and the way of working is on the whole unchanged, I use the same materials wool cotton and linen, a conscious choice, the materials are suited to being worked by hand. The act of weaving defies time, and thoughts go to the ancient worlds, and the weavers who sat as I do. When the idea of time was different, with the constants the sun and the moon. But we live in a constructed world that defies the seasons, day and night, we work hard in our communities that now reach out across the globe connected by an invisible web.

As I weave I am time travelling, the process of weft through warp over the span of a hand unchanged for millennia. My thoughts are of humanity and our place in this world. 

In deconstructing my weaving process and reconstructing it, exploring the motion and focus of passing weft through warp, it is finding an expressive path a a painter does. I create no formal tapestry techniques  just the pattern of the hand weaving: the weaving is a meditative act both literally and conceptually. A carefully constructed system of preparation, creates a space for the weaving process where. The outcome is not planned and it takes courage to weave in this way slowly building upward from the warp bar, once woven the decisions can’t be changed. The finished work reveals the activity of the mind the constant search to flow one piece of weft seamlessly into the next.

I am industrious in my activity like the weavers of the past, revealed in the fragments of tapestry they leave behind. Connecting humanity through the centuries.

Katharine Swailes, June 2022