The gallery will be back open to the public from Thursday 15 April. To maintain social distancing we are limiting numbers inside the gallery spaces, please book a time slot for your visit. Entrance is by Membership only.
The restaurant will reopen on Thursday 20 May.
The barn gallery is closed for exhibition installation 6 – 14 May. The Long Gallery can still be visited for the Alan Cotton exhibition ‘Coast’ until Sunday 9 May.
January – May 2021
Active Environmentalism is our take on how to better understand the right thing to do. We can’t value what we don’t know and by becoming better informed we can more readily make the right decisions individually.
Join us for a programme of connected discussions where we learn about the environment to help shape the way we chose to live our lives.
March – April 2021
The second in our series of online talks focusses on the handmade and the makers at the forefront. The series will be running alongside our annual ceramics exhibition.
Each talk is approximately 30-40 minutes long followed by discussions and we welcome your questions in advance to help build the conversation.
6 March – 2 May
Ree Soo-Jong (born 1948) has long been recognised as one of Korea’s principal ceramic artists. Vitally, he has always been engaged with painting and drawing, running this thread alongside his ceramic activity.
6 March – 2 May
Lee Hun Chung (born 1967) has a national reputation as an artist who has engaged with conceptualist approaches to practice. He often works with large-scale installations, that deliberately confound any demarcation between the various disciplines.
Art critic Chang Dong Kwang tells us that “Lee is a potter, sculptor, designer, architect, painter, installation artist, poet, and labourer, because he is full of raw human character”. Much of his work is multi-media, with large-scale ceramic sculptural forms at their heart.
6 March – 2 May
For our third annual celebration of ceramic we are delighted to invite Paul Greenhalgh, Director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, to curate this collection of senior twentieth century ceramicists; Magdalene Odundo, Alison Britton, Carol McNicoll, Martin Smith & Steve Dixon.
9 April – 2 May
Born in Reykjavík, Iceland, Haraldsdóttir’s works are inspired by Nordic pattern and folklore. Her family was originally from a small village on the Snaefellness Peninsular called Olafsvík in the shadow of the celebrated twin peaked glacial mountain that inspired Jules Verne’s novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
9 – 25 April
This spring ceramic artist Makoto Kagoshima will exhibit his latest pieces in the Elisabeth Frink studio at Messums Wiltshire, a collection of which were inspired by the sculptor.
Makoto Kagoshima, based in Kyushu, the southern island of Japan, illustrates whimsical and heart-warming motifs on clay, making each ceramic object a unique, one-of-a-kind piece of art. Kagoshima’s designs are all done freehand.
9 April – 9 May
In this exhibition we are showing forty paintings by Alan Cotton, one of Britain’s leading landscape artists, of the coasts of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, County Kerry, Jersey and the Isle of Skye.
Depicting the the varying moods of the sea as well as the precipitous rock formations and crags that form our coastline, Cotton’s carefully constructed pictures reflect the quiet convolutions of nature and yet its constancy.
15 May – 11 July
In a miasma of delicately tessellated marks, After the Raft of the Medusa by painter John Beard is painted in black and white oils and wax and is accompanied by a mirrored image etched onto a vast black aluminium sheet suggesting the dark and inky depths of the sea.
18 June – 11 July
Jack McGarrity trained at the Glasgow School of Art, close to where he grew up in the West of Scotland, before moving to London to start at the Royal Drawing School. His works on paper are a hybrid of painting, drawing and collage of small everyday moments mixed with the high drama of cinema and the ambiguity of memory.
17 July – 5 September
“Sonia Leber & David Chesworth are cultural investigators, landing lightly in foreign territory, weighed down only with a mixed bag of pre-entry research, a video camera, some sound equipment and a couple of laptops. The work they are going to make is out there waiting; images and events to be re-interpreted, re-framed, recorded and edited.” Fiona Gruber
‘What Listening Knows’ is an immersive 3-channel audio and video installation by Australian artists Sonia Leber & David Chesworth, commissioned for our second Moving Image exhibition at Messums Wiltshire this winter. Currently in development, the research and filming was undertaken here in Wiltshire in the Summer of 2019, when Sonia and David were Messums’ first artists-in-residence. The resulting video uses unique Wiltshire environments as sites to explore the act of listening.
