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Hello and welcome back to the Fen Ditton Gallery podcast with Hannah Munby. In this episode, I'm joined by Jo Barker whose beautiful work is currently on display at Fen Ditton Gallery as part of the exhibition Textiles Today? Three Generations of Artist Weavers, which is open until Sunday 1st November. You can find out more and view the exhibition online at fendittongallery.com

This conversation was recording with Agnes Treherne live at Fen Ditton Gallery on Wednesday 25th February 2026 as part of the Kindred Land exhibition. Gallery Manager / Curator Hannah discusses with Agnes the landscape as her continual inspiration, her creative upbringing and the influence of her mother and the family on her work. You can view the exhibition and discussed works online at fendittongallery.com/agnes-treherne The exhibition is open until Sunday 1st March 2026. Fen Ditton Gallery, 23 High Street, Fen Ditton, Cambridge CB5 8ST

Hello and welcome back to the Fen Ditton Gallery podcast, with gallery manager Hannah Munby This episode features a conversation with ceramicist Claire Curneen, who is currently exhibiting at the gallery as part of our exhibition ‘A Conversation with Trees’. The exhibition is open until Sunday 27th October. Find out more and view the show online at fendittongallery.com/a-conversation-with-trees Claire Curneen has been working in ceramics for over twenty years. She graduated from Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork, with a Diploma in Art and Design (Ceramics) in 1991. Her hand-built ceramic sculptures are poignant reflections on the nature of humanity and our precarious place within it. For many years, Claire’s ideas and projects have explored and re-interpreted narratives drawn from the world of myths and history. The two works that are currently on show at Fen Ditton Gallery, ‘Splinter’ (2018) and ‘Daphne’ (2024), draw on the classical myth of Apollo and Daphne as told in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book 1, ll. 452–567. Examples of Claire’s work can be found in over 20 major museum collections including: Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; V & A Museum, London; National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh; and the Icheon World Ceramics Centre, Korea.

Before completing the Drawing Year in 2021, Otis Blease studied Drawing and Printmaking at Bristol’s University of the West of England, where he was awarded the Dumfries House residency upon graduation. Having grown up in rural Cornwall, the move to London to study at The Royal Drawing School had a considerable impact on his work and the city’s constant state of motion added an energy and spontaneity to his practice. Working with mixed media materials, often onto paper he explores feelings of excitement and anxiety in his work, interested in the way life can seem both thrilling and mundane simultaneously. Otis’ recent work is an exploration of combining drawing, painting and printmaking, and works from life, making drawings and notes in his sketchbook, often of the people he sees on public transport. These sketches are developed into charcoal drawings and then onto larger paintings. His work relies on ‘accidents’ and disused sections of previous works come back into play, with a mixed on observational and imaginary image making. This conversation with emerging artist Otis Blease was recorded as part of our currently exhibition, Voices in Drawing, which features the work of six recent graduates and alumni from The Royal Drawing School The exhibition is open until Sunday 25th February 2024 and can be viewed online at fendittongallery.com

Olly Williamson was born in 1994 and grew up in a village just outside of Preston.  He completed the Drawing ear at the Royal Drawing School in 2023, after graduating from Manchester School of Art with a first-class honours in Fine Art in 2016. Olly makes work about quiet situations in life, utilising intense observation and experimental structures of composition. His images reflect the underlying rhythms of the people and the world he sees around him, hoping to make the everyday feel monumental. This conversation was during our current Voices in Drawing exhibition. The exhibition showcases the work of six recent graduates and alumni from The Royal Drawing School and is open until Sunday 25th February 2024. You can find out more and view the exhibition online at ⁠⁠fendittongallery.com⁠⁠

Originally from Cambridge, Felix Higham studied at Central St Martin’s before completing The Drawing Year in 2021. His artistic focus centres on the intricate study of people and the dynamics of life within the spaces we construct for our use. His observational drawings conducted in pubs and cafés provide material from which Felix constructs narrative works back in the studio. Through the placement of doorways and positioning of light sources, structural interiors become pivotal in dictating the viewer’s perspective within these spaces. This conversation with emerging artist Felix Higham was during our current Voices in Drawing exhibition. The exhibition showcases the work of six recent graduates and alumni from The Royal Drawing School and is open until Sunday 25th February 2024. You can find out more and view the exhibition online at ⁠⁠fendittongallery.com⁠⁠

This conversation was recorded with emerging artist Ellie Lonsdale who is currently exhibiting at Fen Ditton Gallery as part our Voices in Drawing exhibition. The exhibition showcases the work of six recent graduates and alumni from The Royal Drawing School and is open until Sunday 25th February 2024. You can find out more and view the exhibition online at ⁠⁠fendittongallery.com⁠⁠ Ellie Lonsdale graduated from Falmouth University with a first-class degree in Illustration, before joining The Drawing Year in 2022. Her practice is driven by narrative, where drawings act as windows into observed and imagined worlds. Ellie is drawn to capture moments and places where the manmade and natural environments intersect, the relationship between structures that are firm and rooted, and those that are ephemeral. Often returning to the same location over time to build a strong memory of place, her process involves continuous alternation between erasure and addition, allowing compositions to emerge as she works. The images present themselves as a visible history of layers that evoke a sensation of shifting - reflecting how things come and go; seasonal transitions, memories and people.

Hello and welcome to the Fen Ditton Gallery podcast, with me Hannah Munby. This conversation was recorded with emerging artist Euan Evans on my recent visit to his studio in Stoke Newington, to collect the paintings and drawings that are currently on show at Fen Ditton Gallery as part our Voices in Drawing exhibition. The exhibition showcases the work of six recent graduates and alumni from The Royal Drawing School and is open until Sunday 25th February 2024. Euan Evans was born in Cornwall in 1996, and originally studied Jazz at Leeds Conservatoire before completing the Drawing Year in 2022. He went on to study MA Printmaking at The Royal College of Art and was awarded the Printmaker’s Council Sheila Sloss Award at his graduation show in 2023. Euan’s training in music allows him to explore the interactions between improvisation, texture, and composition through visual enquiries. His recent work is poised between sculpture and printmaking, incorporating drawing and painting through his practice. His work is often routed in the personal, using inspiration from places that he has lived.      You can find out more and view the exhibition online at ⁠fendittongallery.com⁠ Exhibition opening times: Thursdays 11am - 4pm Weekends 10am - 5pm Other times by appointment, contact [email protected] to book

Agnes Treherne was born in Sussex in 1987. She studied Fine Art and History of Art at the University of Edinburgh, and went on to complete The Drawing Year at The Royal Drawing School, graduating in 2021. In was in the September following her graduation that Agnes first exhibited at Fen Ditton Gallery.  Agnes’ work is concerned with how our thoughts and articulations are informed by the environments in which we live. She works from the premise that the act of drawing, and the attention it gives to what is being drawn, is fruitful both to the artist and the subject, so that the existence of both is enriched by the other. When there is a figurative element in her paintings and drawings, it is often to convey both connection and dislocation.   This conversation was recorded with Agnes on my recent visit to her home in Sussex to collect the paintings and drawings that are currently on show at Fen Ditton Gallery as part our Voices in Drawing exhibition. The exhibition showcases the work of six recent graduates and alumni from The Royal Drawing School and is open until Sunday 25th February.   You can find out more and view the exhibition online at fendittongallery.com Exhibition opening times: Thursdays 11am - 4pm Weekends 10am - 5pm Other times by appointment, contact [email protected] to book

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Fen Ditton Gallery podcast, with me, Hannah Munby.   My conversation today is with textile artist Ptolemy Mann, whose exquisite bold woven works will be shown in our upcoming exhibition ‘Going Yellow’. In this conversation, Ptolemy and I discuss her bohemian upbringing; how her extensive colour theory training allows her to break the rules, how she has owned the phrase ‘Chromatic minimalism’, and why textile artists should be taken seriously in the contemporary art world.   Going Yellow is a multidisciplinary exhibition at Fen Ditton Gallery from the 14th October to 12th November. It continues an occasion series of shows that focus on artists who are inspired by and explore colour in their practice. Visit fendittongallery.com to find out more about the exhibition. We are proud to be supporting Hospice UK’s Go Yellow campaign this autumn and will be donating a percentage of sales from this exhibition to support the work they do in providing vital end of life care. For more information about Hospice UK, you can visit hospiceuk.org.   Thank you and I hope you enjoy this conversation!

Hello and welcome back to the Fen Ditton Gallery podcast   In this episode, I speak to Cambridge artist David Emond, whose exhibition ‘Light, Colour, Pattern’ is currently on display at Fen Ditton Gallery. This is David’s first solo exhibition and includes works that spans the last 45 years of his artistic journey.   You can view the exhibition online at fendittongallery.com/light-colour-pattern or in person at Fen Ditton Gallery, 23 High Street, Fen Ditton CB5 8ST until Sunday 17th September.   We look forward to welcoming you and I hope you enjoy this conversation.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Fen Ditton Gallery podcast that was recorded at the gallery as part of our current exhibition Willard Boepple 'Shards and Sources'. We are very grateful to Elenor Ling and Kip Gresham, both of whom have been incredibly generous with their time and knowledge not just for this exhibition but for other projects at the gallery too – namely the Contemporary Printmaking Prize earlier in the year for which they were both judges. We first had the pleasure of working with Kip Gresham and The Print Studio, Cambridge in January 2022 on an exhibition titled ‘The Language of Abstraction, which highlighted some of Kip’s most significant printmaking collaborations during his extensive career – including John McClean, Gillian Ayres, Kim Lim, and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham to name a few. It was this exhibition that introduced the gallery to American sculptor Willard Boepple and his astonishing screenprints stood out as a unique and dynamic response to the medium, offering a sculptural experience through the layered medium of screenprint. In a newly commissioned essay by American art critic, Michael Fried, he writes of the prints that they are “...manifestly the work of a sculptor as one tracks not just the interaction of the hues but also the sense of implied physical relationships among the different shapes... an implied continuity from one shape to the next, as if across a sharp spatial "fold." It was this implied continuity and sharp spatial folds that inspired Willard to take his monoprints, translate them to vinyl and re-work the narrative back into the low relief, three-dimensional forms that you can see in the gallery today. Kip was joined by Elenor Ling who is the Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. She is responsible for the care, interpretation and display of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s print collection, comprising 125,000 objects, and has a particular interest in histories and methodologies of collecting. Elenor was co-curator of the major, interdisciplinary exhibition The Human Touch: Making Art, Leaving Traces (2021), and has been the sole curator of several exhibitions in the museum’s Print Gallery. This week the Fitzwilliam Museum received the fifth allocation of editioned prints made at The Print Studio, Cambridge, which included Willard’s print ‘George’ which is available as part of this exhibition. The museum’s long-standing relationship with the Print Studio has become one of the Fitzwilliam’s key sources for contemporary works. So, I think we can all agree that this conversation is very timely… We hope you enjoy this conversation and do head over to fendittongallery.com to view all the works online. The exhibition can be viewed in person at Fen Ditton Gallery, Cambridge until Sunday 18th June.

Hello and welcome back to the Fen Ditton Gallery podcast, hosted by Hannah Munby. In this episode, I was delighted to interview artist and printmaker Sarah Gillespie who is currently exhibiting at the gallery as part of our Art, Science and the Natural World exhibition. The exhibition brings together three artists who have recently completed an invited residency with the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, focussing on lesser-known IUCN redlist species that are in decline due to environmental change. Sarah Gillespie was born in Winchester in 1963. She studied 16th & 17th century methods and materials at the Atelier Neo-Medici in Paris before going on to read Fine Art at Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art. Born into (in her own words) a chaotic, creative household, Sarah says that art materials were just always around to be experimented with. That and the fact she spent much of her early years outside, exploring the natural world has been pivotal in the artistic path she has taken. Sarah’s detailed, monochrome mezzotints celebrate one of the UK’s most elusive insects, the moth. Sarah says :Since I began studying and drawing moths ten years ago, I have felt more and more aware of their importance and the need to record and draw attention to their fragile beauty.” It was during her Cambridge Conservation Initiative residency that Sarah discovered that almost all species of moth (and there are over 2,500) are in serious decline. In this interview, we chatted about Sarah’s early childhood and the influences that has had on her career, what exactly a mezzotint engraving is, and how she hope her work will be an apology to the natural world for the damage we have caused. I hope you enjoy this conversation and thank you for listening. To view Sarah’s work and find out more about the exhibition, visit fendittongallery.com

In this episode, I’m joined by artist Wycliffe Stutchbury who is currently exhibiting in our Water/Land exhibition. Formerly a furniture maker, Wycliffe has chosen to continue to work with wood in his artistic career too. The works start with a hunt for the timber, whether that be foraging or searching dealers for the piece that will inspire his next project. The piece that we are lucky enough to be showing at the gallery is called ‘Hundred Foot Drain 9’ and has been made from a piece of Bog Oak that was recovered just down the road from us in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire. Wycliffe says of his work “My compositions made from fallen and forgotten timber are studies in the narrative beauty of wood. They are made to reveal timbers’ response to its environment over time, its un-fashioned beauty, durability, and vulnerability. The origin of the material I use is central to my work.’ In 2003, he graduated from the University of Brighton with a BA in 3D Craft and co-founded the Blue Monkey Studio, a collective of Eastbourne based artists, in the same year. The artist has exhibited extensively in the UK and the US and has significant works in international private collections. He has received several notable awards, including from the Crafts Council UK and the Worshipful Company of Furniture Makers UK. In 2018, Wycliffe was shortlisted for the Loewe Craft Prize. For more information about our Water/Land exhibition, visit fendittongallery.com Wycliffe Stutchbury: wycliffestutchbury.co.uk @wycliffestutchbury

Welcome back to the Fen Ditton Gallery podcast, with me, Hannah Munby. This episode features a recent conversation with Otis Blease, who is one of three recent graduates from Royal Drawing School that will be exhibited in our Voices in Drawing exhibition this autumn. Otis completed a Drawing and Printmaking degree at Bristol UWE, before going on to study on the prestigious Drawing Year at the Royal Drawing School. Having grown up in rural Cornwall and, on moving to Bristol and then London to study, he says he finally found the context for the energetic lines that had begun to emerge in his work. This conversation explores Otis’ inspirations and motivations behind his work, how he coped being flung back into rural life during the pandemic and what’s next for this young emerging artist. I hope you enjoy this conversation and do visit the Voices in Drawing exhibition, in person or online at fendittongallery.com between the 10th - 26th September 2021.