Press Release

Artists’ Open House 2023

WINDOWS AND THRESHOLDS

13th - 14th & 20th - 21st May

@windowsandthresholds

Bell House will be hosting a new exhibition during the Dulwich Festival Artists’ Open House. Over 40 artists - painters, printmakers, sculptors, filmmakers and photographers - explore the theme of Windows and Thresholds in a series of five exhibitions in Bell House.  With a nod to the new Berthe Morisot show at Dulwich Picture Gallery, Windows and Thresholds considers whether these are barriers symbolic of separation and division or portals of opportunity. Looking inwards and outwards a group of female curators  each take a room and invite us to cross over into their worlds.

Curators: Min Angel / Jo Mason, Lucy Bainbridge, Ky Lewis, Sarah Sparkes / Jane Millar, Kim Thornton

Bell House projects will also be on view with a display of work from the Quilt Academy and a chance to see The Garage Press (letterpress printing) in action.

Events

There will be a series of events during the exhibition including performances, a curator talk and two Alternative Process Photography Workshops: on Cyanotype/Anthotype and Lumen/Phytogram.

Min Angel / Jo Mason - Lucas Room

Windows and Thresholds - Breaking Glass

The exhibition Windows and Thresholds references the important impressionist painter, Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) whose work is currently being shown at Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Constrained by the conventions of both her time and class, Morisot’s subject matter was restricted to the domestic spaces she occupied and the public ones - where she would have been chaperoned. However, she treated this seemingly quiet domestic subject matter as ‘heroic meditations on the world of modern suburban women’ (Tamar Garb, In Our Time). By transforming reality into the majestical and magical she found a way to breach the constraints of the time. Her relevance to us today is profound given our ongoing conversations around gender justice and access to opportunity.

With this in mind, Min Angel and Jo Mason have selected 8 female painters who, in their various ways, fling open the windows and push against the boundaries. Windows and Thresholds in the Lucas Room reflects on the psychological spaces of our environments (interiors as well as landscapes), identity, historical female representations and ideas of the feminine, the spiritual and the magical. The work can be described as observational, mythological, feminist, personal and transcendental each with their own dialogue with painting’s history and language.

Artists: Min Angel, Julie Caves, Pippa Gatty, Jo Mason, Hannah Murgatroyd, Alice Neave, Daniella Norton, Alix Philippe, Jayne Anita Smith, Jacqueline Utley.

Sarah Sparkes / Jane Millar - MacAndrew Room, Lutyens Room

Windows and Thresholds - It's Coming From Inside

External inscrutability, internal passion, domestic confines and dreams of escape...

Sarah Sparkes and Jane Millar have invited 20 artists to exhibit across two rooms, and a hallway, on opposing sides of Bell House: the MacAndrew room, a scullery, tucked away off of a long corridor, lined with coat hooks and the Lutyens room, a light-filled drawing room, close to the elegant front entrance.

In their thinking about the Impressionist Berthe Morisot, and the exhibitions broader theme of Windows and Thresholds,  the curators see the two different domestic spaces, and the liminal corridors between, as places expressive of dialogues in both Morisot’s and their invited artists' works:  of confines, dreams of escape, of external inscrutability and internal passion.

The Lutyens Room becomes a cabinet of entrance and exits, of frames, veils and delicacy; a parlour for a person of leisure; for ornament, miniatures and portraits. The shelves, the mantelpiece and a curved table, act as spaces for mementos and intimacy.

Just outside the MacAndrew Room the corridor, with its many coat hooks, is a passage of transformation, for casting off the norms of everyday by putting on garments that consume, creep, and protect.

The MacAndrew Room, a scullery, is a warm and informal domestic space where materials shift across themes of food, the body, flesh, plant, clothing, clay.  A wine red fireplace in this space is seen by the curators as a portal for energies that move, along the corridor and antechambers, to the Lutyens Room, and out, through the windows, to the outside.

Artists:  Fran Burden, Ruth Calland, Helen Carr, Mikey Cuddihy, Janet Currier, Robert Dawson, Andrew Ekins, Liz Elton, Lisa Fielding-Smith, Birgitta Hosea, Deborah Gardner, Caroline Gregory, Mindy Lee, Wayne Lucas, Julia Maddison, Jane Millar, Darren O’Brien, Kim Pace, Sarah Sparkes, Geraldine Swayne.

Lucy Bainbridge - Hall

Windows and Thresholds - Views in Focus

I have brought together five artist printmakers who explore different ways of experiencing windows and thresholds, from either going from one place to another or looking out to somewhere, both theoretically and technically. From my screenprinted windows to Lesley Syme’s simple plant forms, between us we demonstrate a wide range of printmaking techniques; screenprint, photopolymer, and cyanotype. I hope this curation showcases the breadth of artists who come to print at Bainbridge Print Studios and exemplify what the studio has to offer. 

Artists: Lucy Bainbridge, Jennifer Moore, Katy Binks, Lesley Syme, Olivia Wells.

Ky Lewis - Thomas Wright Room

Windows and Thresholds - Embracing The Bounds

The given theme of Windows and Thresholds inspired by the current Berthe Morrisot exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery immediately made me consider the challenges we confront in producing our work today. We may now be able to ‘freely’ leave our studios to create ‘en plain air’ but we face a variety of other difficulties. 

The seven artists I have brought together work across a range of disciplines, primarily photographic, printmaking and drawing. Their practices look at contemporary constraints such as isolation, pyschogeography, environmental concerns, portals and the layering of time and space.

Embracing the bounds within their practice and subject matter these artists cross to the other side creating powerful and ephemeral works filled with layers of depth and emotion.

Artists: Zara Carpenter, Wendy Hardie, Anna Lerner, Lucy Ribeiro, Vanessa Short, Laura Ward, Ky Lewis.

Kim Thornton - Landing, Lucas Room

Windows and Thresholds - Beyond Closed Doors

Much of Berthe Morisot’s work remains in private collections, beyond closed doors.  She mostly worked inside unlike her ‘en plein air’ contemporaries, and the door to being seen as a professional artist remained closed to her.  However, rather than perceiving windows as representing barriers, Morisot used them to experience and to frame a scene and to bring light and air in. She re-purposed them to reverse the traditional image of the woman at the window and to challenge the idea of gendered spaces.

In this exhibition ten multidisciplinary artists escape from the prevailing boundaries. Their vision plays with portals in unexpected ways. They cross these in-between spaces created by windows and by thresholds, to present works which evoke a sense of possibility and opportunity.   After all, a threshold links the interior to the exterior; it is an entry and an exit point; and most importantly it is the point of departure for an adventure.

Artists: Rosie Barnes, Léonie Cronin, Nicky Hirst, Monika Kita, Sarah Lightman, Laura Moreton-Griffiths, Ella Soni, Lucy Soni, Charlotte Squire, Kim Thornton.