THREE painters and one of the country’s leading furniture designer-makers are featured in the new exhibition, Silence and Slow Time, at Sladers Yard, West Bay, continuing to 18th March.

The exhibits are painters Louise Balaam, Nicholas Jones and Alfred Stockham, and Petter Southall, the Scandinavian maker who is the resident furniture designer at the gallery.

The exhibition also features a selection of ceramics, textiles, leather, accessories, homeware and jewellery
by leading designers and makers.

Silence and Slow Time celebrates and explores the paradox of the phenomenon in which something can be both still and full of movement, silent and full of sound, flat – or made from flat pieces – and yet able to create space, lightness and mood for years into the future.

In the featured work, the four artists step back from the illusions they create to consider what it is that is actually going on.

Alfred Stockham used to joke about being part of the Flat Earth Society, who see the world in two dimensions.

Louise Balaam has said: “I love the way paint is simultaneously itself, essentially coloured mud, while also somehow evoking the space and light of the landscape.”

Nicholas Jones’s calm, meditative work opens up space and light for others.

Petter Southall, working in hardwoods to make practical, strong furniture, uses design and craftsmanship to introduce lightness and space into his pieces and into the room around them.

The other makers are Sue Ure, tableware, finely thrown porcelain and white stoneware mugs, cups and bowls; Margo Selby, woven silk cushions; Wallace Sewell, scarves; and ceramics by Paul Wearing, Peter Hayes, Mike Dodd, the late Richard Batterham and Adela Powell

Pictured: Nicholas Jones, The Luminous Isle – Holy Isle, Evening, acrylic on canvas; Louise Balaam, Blowy Day, Across the Water, oil on canvas.