Art and the River Deben
1 - 16 October 2022

The first of two newly commissioned cross-disciplinary exhibitions exploring artists’ connections to rivers which launches our Art and Environment season. A percentage of sales of works from the exhibitions will go towards supporting sustainable river projects in East Anglia.

Art and The River Deben celebrates Suffolk’s River Deben which flows for nearly 25 miles from its source near Debenham to the North Sea at Felixstowe Ferry. All the artists have longstanding connections to the River Deben.

Lotte Attwood (photography); Ros Conway (enamels); Janine Hall (drawings); Simon Read (drawings); Annie Turner (clay sculpture)

About the artists

LOEWE Prize shortlisted ceramic sculptor Annie Turner (b.1958) grew up beside the Deben learning to sail, swim and fish for herring using driftnets. Her passion for, and immersion in, this intertidal landscape was born of a working connection to the river which continues to exert major influence on her ceramic forms. Works become metaphors for the process of change, holding memories as well as making direct reference to the manmade wooden structures that emerge and submerge at different points of the tide: jetties, groynes, sluices, sinkers, fish traps.

Lotte Attwood (b.1952) is similarly drawn to this manmade river architecture, visiting the Deben over many decades to capture the graphic forms shown here in a series of newly printed, black and white images. Her work is inspired by the element of change in river landscapes, and she aims to evoke the atmosphere of that in her work.

Enameller and glassmaker Ros Conway (b.1951) and visual artist Simon Read (b. 1949) created a home and two studios on the Deben in the 1970s by restoring a Dutch barge in Woodbridge. Conway’s fine enamelling is seen here in a series of intricate brooches which explore river flora and two pate de verre glass forms that are part of her Nereides series. Two map drawings by Read reflect the artist’s interest in how imagination, and visual language – the key tools of artistic life – might help us develop a more environmentally sustainable relationship to rivers.

Janine Hall’s drawings emerged from two years of lockdown walks along the Deben. Her first career as Graphic Designer in London shifted when she went back to college to study Fine Art and Painting. Drawing has always been central to her work and her evocative pencil drawings capture the interplay of light and shadow in the changing state of the intertidal zones.

Available Works