Unframed Moments: On Showing Work

There is a particular excitement in the lead up to an exhibition, a blend of anticipation mixed with more than a pinch of apprehension. Putting work into a public space is not just about exposure, it is about vulnerability. It feels as though your innermost self is open to the gaze of others. Will the work bear the scrutiny of strangers?

Between the lost and known, 2025, found object, repurposed prints, stitch

Putting work into an exhibition is an opportunity to see the work anew. Once installed in the gallery, there is a shift. The pieces begin to breathe differently. They take on a life of their own and stand on their own merit. In this fresh light, patterns and connections begin to emerge, I see links between pieces that I had not consciously noticed in the cocoon of the studio. A thread from one piece leads gently into the next. Textures and marks echo one another. The work begins to find its voice.

Choosing how to display the work was a challenge I welcomed. There is often a degree of risk in this: will this piece hold its space? Will that grouping make sense, does anything within the line of sight jar? But the act of curating is part of the thinking. It is not just presentation, it is a continuation of the exploration. Each decision about spacing, sequencing, orientation questions the work and sometimes the work answers back.

Deep Looking: Colour & Light, 2025, at Oxmarket Contemporary, Chichester

Visitor walking past Ties that bind I & II, 2024 and Dancing in the Air, 2025 series.

The private view at Deep Looking: Colour & Light at Oxmarket Contemporary was a gentle gathering of curious eyes and generous minds. I met visitors in the course of the exhibition who were fellow makers, each with their own relationship to process, material and mess. Others came as art lovers, sometimes collectors, and people who hold space for art in their lives in different, and no less meaningful, ways. Conversations unspooled. Sometimes about specific works, other times about the nature of creative making, of craft, of the quiet labour of the hand. We talked, we listened, we learned from each other and, mostly, we found joy and support.

Keeping in Touch, 2025, found objects and yarns

Nothing is lost (found object and netting) 2024 and Dancing in the Air (series of paper lithographs on handmade paper, 2025

What I love most is that exhibitions are not tidy conclusions: they mark a pause in the process, the end of one thread and the beginning of another. This one left me with ideas bubbling up, still unfolding. I am looking forward to getting back into the studio and seeing where these ideas take me.

Nexus, artist book illustrated with paper lithography images of weavings, string and fibres.

Consuelo Simpson is an artist and maker living and working in Hampshire. Her multidisciplinary practice is focused on seeking moments of enchantment and on reaching an accommodation with the world. She remains obsessed with string!

Hans Coper: Resurface, The Arc, Winchester

The Hans Coper exhibition brings together three murals, shown together for the first time, as well as over twenty other items which include pots, an incised plaster panel, clay prints and the mould for an acoustic wall tile.

Powell Duffryn Mural, commissioned in 1961 from Hans Coper

Hans Coper is recognised as one of Britain’s the most famous ceramicists. He became widely recognised as an innovative ceramicist, one whose work tended to the minimalist abstract, but whose pots remained largely functional. Working with a restrained palette of black, brown and white, he continued to refine the form of his pots, categorised as spade, thistle and arrow forms, enhancing these with abraded finishes and sgraffitto’d incisions which interrupt the surface.

‘I am a potter, but he was an artist’ said Lucie Rie [cited A Show of Hans, Tanya Harrod, The World of Interiors, 16 October 2023]. Coper joined Rie’s studio in 1946, where Coper learned to throw, working at first on Rie’s designs and soon also on his own, as both focused on thrown vessels.  They parted, friends and equals, when Coper moved to his own studio in 1959.

Hans Coper ceramics at The Arc, Winchester

Hans Coper ceramics and the Swinton School Mural (1961) at The Arc, Winchester

Coper was intensely private and burned all his papers before his death.  A record of his working life, his pots, his studios and Coper himself, was captured in the beautiful images taken by his wife, photographer Jane Gate, some of which accompany the work in this exhibition.

Mural commissioned by Royal Army Pay Corps, Hans Coper

Ceramic pots, Hans Coper

The exhibition has been beautifully curated by the Hampshire Cultural Trust team and is well worth the entrance fee. While Coper’s practice was largely pot based, the three murals were commissioned in the 1960s after his first solo exhibition at Henry Rothschild’s Primavera Gallery, enhanced his reputation. With two murals now in private hands, this may be the last time that the murals are shown together as they will go their separate ways when the exhibition closes on 24 March. There are plans for Fide et Fiducia, originally commissioned by the Royal Army Pay Corps, to remain in Winchester, to be put on public display as part of the Adjutant General’s Corps museum renovations.

Hans Coper: Resurface, The Arc, Winchester until 24 March 2025

Consuelo Simpson is an artist and maker living and working in Hampshire. Her multidisciplinary practice is focused on seeking moments of enchantment and on reaching an accommodation with the world. She remains obsessed with string!