Art Exhibitions

Exhibitions are hung on the upstairs Ramp and in the Gallery.

Please register your interest to attend Private Views by emailing the theatre via the Contact page.

Entry to the exhibitions is free and the Gallery can be viewed:

Mondays to Saturdays 10am-3pm – when the box office is open and there are no events taking place in the gallery. 

Also Wednesdays to Saturdays from 6.30pm during evening performances. 

If you are travelling any distance, please call the Theatre to check that the gallery is open.

Sarah Lee and Teddy Salad: Modern Folk

Monday 29th July - Tuesday 10th September

Unlike folk-music, which continues to thrive in contemporary Britain, the tradition of folk-art is usually seen as belonging to a much earlier, pre-industrial culture. By calling itself ‘Modern Folk’ this exhibition argues that there are in fact highly original, self-taught artists out there, working beyond the art-world elites, who are, quite unselfconsciously, re-inventing its traditions in a post-industrial, digital age.

Sarah Lee, for example, is a self-taught Irish artist, who grew up in West London, where she works full-time as a nurse specialising in psychosis and complex trauma. She sees her illustrations as “portals to a world which exists half-way between reality and a dream ... based on her humorous responses to personal experiences (both inflicted and imposed) and cautionary tales in response to her fears for humanity.” Surrealism, fairy tales and the everyday mundane are all there in her work, as she re-invents a folkloric tradition for today.

Teddy Salad, likewise, is self-taught, his exuberantly painted and brilliantly coloured paintings and reliefs, often fashioned from found objects, are highly suggestive of traditional sea-side entertainments (e.g. Punch and Judy) and fairground attractions.

They often contain the same double-edged scatological humour too, in the process reinvigorating what could have been seen as something of a dying tradition. Folk art, reinvented for today.

Colin Latter: Looking with Love 

Monday 23rd September – Saturdy 9th November

In this exhibition of recent paintings by Eye-based painter Colin Latter, the everyday objects of his home and studio that form such key part of his works’ subject matter – old armchairs, tubes of paint, 60s Dansette record players and transistor radios, antique lamps, old mugs, materials – are painted with a love and vibrancy that makes them seem very much objects alive in the present moment – “the life of the still-life” as the great metaphysical painter De Chirico once memorably put it.

There is, of course, rather more to it than that: Colin’s father, a typographer and gifted amateur painter, died when Colin was only 4 in 1965, and many of the tubes of paint depicted are in fact the antique ones bequeathed to him by his father, as too are many (though by no means all) of the objects he paints.

Self-taught, like his father, it comes as no surprise perhaps that among his key artistic inspirations have been the Charleston painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and the French Fauvist, Henri Matisse, all artists for whom making the familiar, personal and everyday into something living and transcendent, had become the reason for painting.

Proof Positive: Six East Anglian Graphic Artists:

Dom Theobald, Pam Smy, Liz Taunt, Josie Molloy, Laura Winstone, Vanessa Lubach

25th November - 21st January 2025

With a wealth of marvellously gifted printmakers and graphic artists connected with the region, and the huge variety of techniques and styles to hand, making the final choices for this exhibition has not been easy.

But, from Dom Theobald’s exuberant coloured etchings on landscape themes to Josie Molloy’s bold, spare, Bauhaus-inspired screenprints, Pam Smy’s rich and often mysterious illustrations for children’s books and Liz Taunt’s subtle and playful collographs and drypoints on abstract themes, to Vanessa Lubach’s intricately-carved and multi-layered linocuts on landscape and natural history subjects and Laura Winstone’s ceramic collages and children’s illustration, there will, for sure, be lots of  wonderful visual surprises.

And all just in time for Christmas...