ART HISTORY FESTIVAL 2024 – East of England

Get creative and join us in this free family workshop as part of the national Art History Festival 2024.

Drawing inspiration from Thomas Gainsborough’s world-famous paintings, inspired by the Suffolk landscape, along with exploring the works of other famous landscape artists who have captured their local environment further afield, you will have access to a range of exciting drawing materials to create your own interpretation.

This drop-in session will be based in our Landscape studio which has expansive views over the rooftops of the historic market town of Sudbury.

You will also have access to our camera obscura where you will be able to view Sudbury from a very different perspective – great inspiration for your very own masterpiece!

Join us this Autumn Equinox for the opening event for the exhibition A Common Sun by Tom McDonagh.

Our ever-changing relationship to the sun can be traced by the myths we imagine and the technologies we invent. Ancient myths have long told of human desire to control the sun – to both push away the sun or bring it closer.
Today’s technologies give us new solar powers and possibilities. Solar panels hold the utopic possibility of abundant, clean, affordable energy for all. At the same time, climate change is forcing some to consider geoengineering technologies to dim the sun. What proximity to the sun do we need and want?

A Common Sun will present two newly commissioned artworks, supported by Arts Council England, Harlow Art Trust & The Royal College of Art. A sculpture sited in the historic Water Gardens, responds to the remarkable instruments of Indian Astronomer Sawai Jai Singh, and how we orientate ourselves with the sun.

In the Gibberd Gallery next door, a new light installation collects and depicts a variety of solar mythologies and their relevance to seeking balance in a fractured environment.

Sir Alfred Munnings is famed the world over for his paintings of horseracing. Beginning in Newmarket, the home of racing in the UK, this short film takes you on a journey from Newmarket, to Munnings’ home in Dedham where he created some of his most well-known racing pictures and ends in the USA at the National Sporting Library & Museum in Middleburg where such paintings are loved and appreciated by a far-flung audience.

The sector-wide turn towards participatory research methodologies heralds a long-in-the-making moment of focus for knowledge gleaned outside of the traditional academic space. This event will focus on participatory practices in textile art making, an area of art production that has often involved collaboration.

Join three researchers who have great experience of community-led, collaborative, and participatory textile art making: Beau Brannick, Collections Officer of the Museum of Cambridge and organiser of the Norfolk Trans Joy Community Quilt, Layla Khoo, PhD Student at the University of Leeds and organiser of “A Virtuous Woman” at Hardwick Hall, and Chinelo L. Njaka, Research Fellow at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Chaired by Laura Moseley, founder of Common Threads Press and Assistant Curator of the Women’s Art Collection, the panel will discuss their experiences and explore research in the context of participatory art making in local and global contexts.