AFTER THE FLOOD
5th September - 17th October 2025
Jeffery Camp | Julian Cooper | Ann Dowker | Maggi Hambling | Nick Miller | George Rowlett
This exhibition takes its bearing from the torrential storms that flooded the Gallery earlier this year. With this experience of the malevolent behaviour of water in mind we thought it appropriate to explore through the work of six contemporary artists how water plays a part as a recurring and powerful theme in their own art.
Jeffery Camp’s watery landscapes with his lovers defying gravity as they soar dream-like over Beachy Head, the River Thames and Venice remind us that water captures artists’ imaginations and is used to articulate narratives about the rhythms of human life and a vast range of metaphorical ideas.
As a landscape painter Julian Cooper is primarily interested in the forces that shape the land rather than the picturesque. In the paintings of his native Lake District, he traces the movement of water on the appearance of the terrain: how the cascading mountain streams, waterfalls and becks carve and sculpt the ground in their passage from the high summits to the lowland lakes.
Ann Dowker’s flooded landscapes are of the Nile Valley around Luxor. Living in the community over many years and for months at a time she recorded the daily activities of an agricultural community little changed from their Pharaonic ancestors.
Maggi Hambling’s imagined paintings of Waves capture in paint the sheer raw energy and changing nature of the sea. They are paintings that reach far back into childhood memories of life by the sea and more recent experience of gigantic waves crashing onto the sea wall at Southwold, Suffolk
In contrast Nick Miller works from the direct experience of swimming daily in the Atlantic Ocean where he lives in Ireland. For him ‘my immersion in the sea each day is a direct and unfiltered encounter with the natural world — a form of connection to the universe that fosters resilience, endurance, and discovery.’
And time is also measured in George Rowlett’s paintings of the River Thames. For over 50 years he has painted en plein-air the working life and changing fabric of London along the tidal reaches of the Capital’s water highway as far as its flood defenses: the Thames Barrier.
This glimpse into the watery worlds of a small group of artists reminds us that water remains one of the most majestic of elements that unsurprisingly captures so much attention from artists. We are also reminded that, like artists throughout history, water continues to be utilized as a symbol for purity, tranquillity, power, and mortality.
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11 am – 6 pm
