Welcome to the new gallery

Pulp Fictions, Fusion and Coppice were the first in a special series of exhibitions in the new gallery space, embracing a range of materials and disciplines, including paper, ceramics, glass, wood, textiles, metal, photography and new media.

The programme provided a showcase for a selection of highly-skilled, emerging and established practitioners who are at the forefront of their chosen discipline.

The exhibition, events and activities programmes explored thought-provoking and inspiring ways in which artists and designer-makers approach their practice, use traditional and new techniques and explore the boundaries between fine art, craft and design.

A series of inspiring artists’ talks and artist-led workshops accompany the exhibition programme, tailored to meet the needs of a range of ages and abilities. Many events will be free or available at a minimal cost.

Thread Bare: 13 February - 25 April

Thread Bare brings together the work of Craig Fisher, Lucy Brown, Joanne Haywood and Judith Dwyer, who use textiles to explore the human condition, gender-related concerns, relationships between past and present and narratives constructed around personal and cultural identity. Find out more on the What's On website.

About the artists

• Craig Fisher's large-scale sculptural installations question representations of violence, disaster and macho stereotypes. The resulting textile narratives, which employ both art and craft techniques, defy easy definition and sit unnervingly between high and low culture, reality and fantasy, function and disfunction.
• Lucy Brown's installations investigate displacement, the absence and presence of the body, clothed and unclothed and ideas surrounding female identity. Social issues are explored through reconstructing and re-presenting second-hand clothing associated with the female body. Lucy’s work challenges the boundaries between fine art and making.
• Joanne Haywood's mixed-media jewellery draws on the conflicts of opposites: skeletal wire forms and fleshy crocheted volumes; the natural and unnatural; the absence or presence of colour; the interplay of light and shadow.
• Judith Dwyer’s Dangerous Dolls and Dogs juxtaposes individually dyed silk and velvet bodies with recycled materials to examine the contradictory elements of our existence.