Fen Ditton Gallery

Before completing the Drawing Year in 2021, Otis Blease studied Drawing and Printmaking at Bristol’s University of the West of England, where he was awarded the Dumfries House residency upon graduation. Having grown up in rural Cornwall, the move to London to study at The Royal Drawing School had a considerable impact on his work and the city’s constant state of motion added an energy and spontaneity to his practice. Working with mixed media materials, often onto paper he explores feelings of excitement and anxiety in his work, interested in the way life can seem both thrilling and mundane simultaneously.

Otis’ recent work is an exploration of combining drawing, painting and printmaking, and works from life, making drawings and notes in his sketchbook, often of the people he sees on public transport. These sketches are developed into charcoal drawings and then onto larger paintings. His work relies on ‘accidents’ and disused sections of previous works come back into play, with a mixed on observational and imaginary image making.

The exhibition is open until Sunday 25th

Olly Williamson was born in 1994 and grew up in a village just

Olly makes work about quiet situations in life, utilising

This conversation was during our current Voices in Drawing exhibition. The exhibition showcases the work of six recent graduates and alumni from The Royal Drawing School and is open until Sunday 25th February 2024.

You can find out more and view the exhibition online at ⁠⁠fendittongallery.com⁠⁠

Originally from Cambridge, Felix Higham studied at Central St Martin’s before completing The Drawing Year in 2021. His artistic focus centres on the intricate study of people and the dynamics of life within the spaces we construct for our use. His observational drawings conducted in pubs and cafés provide material from which Felix constructs narrative works back in the studio. Through the placement of doorways and positioning of light sources, structural interiors become pivotal in dictating the viewer’s perspective within these spaces.

This conversation with emerging artist Felix Higham was during our current Voices in Drawing exhibition. The exhibition showcases the work of six recent graduates and alumni from The Royal Drawing School and is open until Sunday 25th February 2024.

You can find out more and view the exhibition online at ⁠⁠fendittongallery.com⁠⁠

This conversation was recorded with emerging artist Ellie Lonsdale who is currently exhibiting at Fen Ditton Gallery as part our Voices in Drawing exhibition. The exhibition showcases the work of six recent graduates and alumni from The Royal Drawing School and is open until Sunday 25th February 2024.

You can find out more and view the exhibition online at ⁠⁠fendittongallery.com⁠⁠

Ellie Lonsdale graduated from Falmouth University with a first-class degree in Illustration, before joining The Drawing Year in 2022. Her practice is driven by narrative, where drawings act as windows into observed and imagined worlds.

Ellie is drawn to capture moments and places where the manmade and natural environments intersect, the relationship between structures that are firm and rooted, and those that are ephemeral. Often returning to the same location over time to build a strong memory of place, her process involves continuous alternation between erasure and addition, allowing compositions to emerge as she works. The images present themselves as a visible history of layers that evoke a sensation of shifting - reflecting how things come and go; seasonal transitions, memories

Hello and welcome to the Fen Ditton Gallery podcast, with me Hannah Munby.

This conversation was recorded with emerging artist Euan Evans on my recent visit to his studio in Stoke Newington, to collect the paintings and drawings that are currently on show at Fen Ditton Gallery as part our Voices in Drawing exhibition. The exhibition showcases the work of six recent graduates and alumni from The Royal Drawing School and is open until Sunday 25th February 2024.

Euan Evans was born in Cornwall in 1996, and originally studied Jazz at Leeds Conservatoire before completing the Drawing Year in 2022. He went on to study MA Printmaking at The Royal College of Art and was awarded the Printmaker’s Council Sheila Sloss Award at his graduation show in 2023.

Euan’s training in music allows him to explore the interactions

You can find out more and view the exhibition online at ⁠fendittongallery.com⁠

Exhibition opening times:

Thursdays 11am - 4pm

Weekends 10am - 5pm

Other times by appointment, contact [email protected] to book

Agnes Treherne was born in Sussex in 1987. She studied Fine Art and History of Art at the University of Edinburgh, and went on to complete The Drawing Year at The Royal Drawing School, graduating in 2021. In was in the September following her graduation that Agnes first exhibited at Fen Ditton Gallery. 

Agnes’ work is concerned with how our thoughts and articulations are informed by the environments in which we live. She works from the premise that the act of drawing, and the attention it gives to what is being drawn, is fruitful both to the artist and the subject, so that the existence of both is enriched by the other. When there is a figurative element in her paintings and drawings, it is often to convey both connection and dislocation.

This conversation was recorded with Agnes on my recent visit to her home in Sussex to collect the paintings and drawings that are currently on show at Fen Ditton Gallery as part our Voices in Drawing exhibition. The exhibition showcases the work of six recent graduates and alumni from The Royal Drawing School and is open until Sunday 25th February.

You can find out more and view the exhibition

Exhibition opening times:

Thursdays 11am - 4pm

Weekends 10am - 5pm

Other times by appointment, contact [email protected] to book

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Fen Ditton Gallery podcast, with me, Hannah Munby.

My conversation today is with textile artist Ptolemy Mann, whose exquisite bold woven works will be shown in our upcoming exhibition ‘Going Yellow’. In this conversation, Ptolemy and I discuss her bohemian upbringing; how her extensive colour theory training allows her to break the rules, how she has owned the phrase ‘Chromatic minimalism’, and why textile artists should be taken seriously in the contemporary art world.

Going Yellow is a multidisciplinary exhibition at Fen Ditton Gallery from the 14th October to 12th November. It continues an occasion series of shows that focus on artists who are inspired by and explore colour in their practice. Visit fendittongallery.com to find out more about the exhibition.

We are proud to be supporting Hospice UK’s Go Yellow campaign this autumn and will be donating a percentage of sales from this exhibition to support the work they do in providing vital end of life care. For more information about Hospice UK, you can visit hospiceuk.org.

Thank you and I hope you enjoy this conversation!

Hello and welcome back to the Fen Ditton Gallery podcast

In this episode, I speak to Cambridge artist David Emond, whose exhibition ‘Light, Colour, Pattern’ is currently on display at Fen Ditton Gallery. This is David’s first solo exhibition and includes works that spans the last 45 years of his artistic journey.

You can view the exhibition online at fendittongallery.com/light-colour-pattern or in person at Fen Ditton Gallery, 23 High Street, Fen Ditton CB5 8ST until Sunday 17th September.

We look forward to welcoming you and I hope you enjoy this conversation.  

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Fen Ditton Gallery podcast that was recorded at the gallery as part of our current exhibition Willard Boepple 'Shards and Sources'.

We are very grateful to Elenor Ling and Kip Gresham, both of whom have been incredibly generous with their time and knowledge not just for this exhibition but for other projects at the gallery too – namely the Contemporary Printmaking Prize earlier in the year for which they were both judges.

We first had the pleasure of working with Kip Gresham and The Print Studio, Cambridge in January 2022 on an

In a newly commissioned essay by American art critic, Michael Fried, he writes of the prints that they are “...manifestly the work of a sculptor as one tracks not just the interaction of the hues but also the sense of implied physical relationships among the different shapes... an implied continuity from one shape to the next, as if across a sharp spatial "fold."

It was this implied continuity and sharp spatial folds that inspired Willard to take his monoprints, translate them to vinyl and re-work the narrative back into the low relief, three-dimensional forms that you can see in the gallery today.

Kip was joined by Elenor Ling who is the Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. She is responsible for the care, interpretation and display of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s print collection, comprising 125,000 objects, and has a particular interest in histories and methodologies of collecting. Elenor was co-curator of the major, interdisciplinary exhibition The Human Touch: Making Art, Leaving Traces (2021), and has been the sole curator of several exhibitions in the museum’s Print Gallery.

This week the Fitzwilliam Museum received the fifth allocation of editioned prints made at The Print Studio, Cambridge, which included Willard’s print ‘George’ which is available as part of this exhibition. The museum’s long-standing relationship with the Print Studio has become one of the Fitzwilliam’s key sources for contemporary works.

So, I think we can all agree that this conversation is very timely…

We hope you enjoy this conversation and do head over to fendittongallery.com to view all the works online. The exhibition can be viewed in person at Fen Ditton Gallery, Cambridge until Sunday 18th June.

Hello and welcome back to the Fen Ditton Gallery podcast, hosted by Hannah Munby. In this episode, I was delighted to interview artist and printmaker Sarah Gillespie who is currently exhibiting at the gallery as part of our Art, Science and the Natural World exhibition. The exhibition brings together three artists who have recently completed an invited residency with the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, focussing on lesser-known IUCN redlist species that are in decline due to environmental change.

Sarah Gillespie was born in Winchester in 1963. She studied 16th & 17th century methods and materials at the Atelier Neo-Medici in Paris before going on to read Fine Art at Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art. Born into (in her own words) a chaotic, creative household, Sarah says that art materials were just always around to be experimented with. That and the fact she spent much of her early years outside, exploring the natural world has been pivotal in the artistic path she has taken.

Sarah’s detailed, monochrome mezzotints celebrate one of the UK’s most elusive insects, the moth. Sarah says :Since I began studying and drawing moths ten years ago, I have felt more and more aware of their importance and the need to record and draw attention to their fragile beauty.” It was during her Cambridge Conservation Initiative residency that Sarah discovered that almost all species of moth (and there are over 2,500) are in serious decline.

In this interview, we chatted about Sarah’s early childhood and the influences that has had on her career, what exactly a mezzotint engraving is, and how she hope her work will be an apology to the natural world for the damage we have caused.

I hope you enjoy this conversation and thank you for listening. To view Sarah’s work and find out more about the exhibition, visit fendittongallery.com