October Exhibitions: John Chamberlain/Lisa Davies

John Chamberlain - On The Page

John Chamberlain is a Lowestoft-based illustrator and designer with a hand-drawn or painted style. The focus of his work is usually on figures, portraits, buildings, nature, and landscapes.

This exhibition features a series of live observational sketches and more sustained drawings influenced by East Anglia. The Black Shuck festival parade is the focus of most of the drawings. An underlying interest in performance crops up in many previous drawings.

In 2021, John graduated from the MA in Illustration and Book Arts at Cambridge School of Art.

Lisa Davies - Into The Dark

Lisa Davies is a Lowestoft-based artist working in print, illustration, and writing. Her exhibition presents vessels made with the pinch-pot technique - an ancient way of creating a vessel, with no tools needed other than the hands of the maker - and plates, created by pressing clay into a plaster mold.

The vessels have become containers for stories. Fairy tales and folk lore which have been part of the human experience for millennia. The stories spill over and down the sides, encouraging the holder to experience the vessel from all angles and rest their fingers in the impressions made in the vessel’s creation. Fairy tales and folk lore are depicted within the plates too, this time contained within the plate’s surface. Merpeople, hags, familiars and giants sit alongside creatures from legend : The Green Man, Black Shuck and the Night Hag. These plates celebrate the unsettling, richer side of fairy tales, inviting the viewer into the dark.

 The ceramics are displayed alongside a small collection of relief prints which celebrates the long association between relief printmaking fairy tale illustrations.