PRESS RELEASE
Village artwork showcased at
The Courtyard
Friday 22 May – Sunday 6 September
Free exhibition
A new exhibition featuring the art and cultural life of a small village on the Welsh border will
be showcased at The Courtyard.
Made in Knucklas: The Village Show is an insight into the art and cultural life of Knucklas, near
Knighton, on the Welsh/English border. The town hosts a remarkable group of artists and
makers, including painters, potters, sculptors and more.
The village have previously held an exhibition under the banner of Made in Knucklas, in the
barn of local couple Will and Lottie O’Leary, which simply showed what they did with their
time in their studios. Following its success, the exhibition at The Courtyard will chart something
of the evolution of the same group over the ten years since the first exhibition.
Made in Knucklas: The Village Show is a demonstration of making and doing by local people
and features the work of Will and Lottie O’Leary, Andy and Corinna Kenyon-Wade, Wendy
Davies, Tony Hall, Lois Hopwood, Maggie Jones, Robert M Wood, and Jane Thomas.
Made in Knucklas: The Village Show will be in place at The Courtyard gallery space on the
top floor from Friday 22 May – Sunday 6 September 2015. The gallery is open 9am – late
Monday to Saturday and 10am – 5pm on Sundays and is free to enter.
For more information visit www.courtyard.org.uk, or visit The Courtyard Gallery on the top
floor from Friday 22 May.
- Ends –
Notes to editors
For interviews, photos or follow up stories, contact Joanna Lucas, Marketing Officer (Press
and Direct Marketing), on 01432 346534 or joanna.lucas@courtyard.org.uk.
Image: Will and Lottie O’Leary, who will be exhibiting their work as part of Made in Knucklas:
The Village Show, at The Courtyard.
The artists featured in the exhibition are:
Wendy Davies, a painter who has always painted and cannot remember not doing so. Her
work is involved in the wild and unusual, from ancient cave paintings, to Celtic stone carving,
to the work of Pueblo Indians.
Tony Hall: a potter who trained at the French ceramic centre La Borne and worked at
Whichford Potteries. He makes big terracotta pots and smaller Ash glaze stoneware vessels.
In 2014 he won the Society of Portrait Sculptors prize for his portrait of Kate Hall and is showing
both his sculpture and stoneware in this exhibition.
Lois Hopwood: a painter, sculptor and filmmaker, who makes landscape pictures of the land
in which she lives, complex formally reduced works, which shift between the scrutiny of
drawing and the invention of painting.
Maggie Jones: a painter working from the memory of landscape, from the coastlines of North
Cornwall to the rolling hills of Wales, enabling her to manipulate the original place, to express
her own experience of a place, to exaggerate and improvise.
Robert M. Wood: He writes of his work in glass: “My work is informed by my interest in cell
biology and evolutionary genetics. In my work I imagine capturing a moment in time. A
freeze frame in the evolutionary river of the development of an organism or a trait.
Captured and frozen like a fossil. A record of a moment, lost in time.”
Andy Kenyon –Wade: a wood-carver for over twenty-five years, making work ranging in
influence from the European Romanesque to Indian temples, in crowded and compressed
compositions determined by the energy of the narrative as much as the properties of the
wood used. The work reflects as much on everyday life in, and the landscape of the Welsh
borders as it does upon the fantastical, creating new and unexpected visual metaphors.
Corinna Kenyon-Wade: a ceramicist with a background as a painter and conservator, who
makes finely thrown, functional pots in simple shapes, stoneware with muted glazes and
porcelain with bright colours, influenced by, amongst other things, mid-twentieth century
studio ceramics and the Chinese tradition.
Will O’Leary: a stone mason & lettering artist, who after many years of carving and handcutting letters is now exploring contemporary letterforms through drawing and painting. He
has been working together with his wife Lottie, carving and lettering to commissions for 21
years this year.
Lottie O’Leary: a stone carver who studied sculpture conservation at City and Guilds art
school in London in the early 1980s, then worked on Canterbury Cathedral, for the National
Trust and subsequently Cliveden Conservation. She has been working together with her
husband Will, carving and lettering to commissions for 21 years this year. Her work involves the
natural forms of the Welsh borders and the wide range of colours of the indigenous types of
stone.
Jane Thomas: a painter in the plein air tradition, who seeks to capture the changes in the
colour and light of the border landscape. And, if it’s too cold she looks out of her studio
window.