an exhibition of paintings by Helen Thomas

3-18 May 2024

Preview:  Thursday 2 May, 7pm-9pm

Mura Ma is delighted to present a solo exhibition of paintings by Helen Thomas.

Specificity of time, place and plants are the subject matter for this Wakefield-based artist who is inspired by plants and their locales.  Working in response to gardens, countryside and post-industrial edgelands, Helen has become focused on unplanned plants and organisms that grow haphazardly in carparks, on pavements, walls, edges of paths – the margins of our urban environment.

Helen records and maps the minutiae of these plants through her fieldwork, in which she embarks on drawing, painting and note-taking from direct observation.

In the studio, Helen’s process of painting is concurrent with slow looking. The paintings extend an invitation to take time on fringes and fragments of plants caught freeze-frame in the break of a stride, where ribbons of micro-habitats thread through the overlooked and seemingly insignificant.

Working with paint including acrylic, gouache and watercolour either on board, on paper and sometimes on canvas, Helen’s studio practice transforms these records into stunning paintings that elevate these forgotten and overlooked life forms and invite the viewer to regard with wonder.

Suzanne Bethell, Bernadette Bone, Sarah Connell, Mair Doyle, Suzie McDaniel, Yvonne Norworyta

28 March-28 April 2024

Artists talk: Thursday 18 April 7pm-9pm

Six artists are co-creating an immersive artists residency and exhibition from 28 March-20 April 2024.  Titled Beyond the frame, the artists will be challenging traditional ways of presenting art, revealing the process of making, discussion and experimentation usually reserved for the studio, and to see what happens in a co-working space.

Visitors to the gallery are invited to observe the artists’ work in progress as it unfolds, whilst the artists consider the threads and themes that connect their work and ask, ‘what is the value of collective creativity?’ To see what happens when they leave the singular studio environment.

The residency is the first time the artists will work together as Studio 8 Collective.  It follows a three-month programme of peer-led studio visits and critiques facilitated by Nan Collantine of Mura Ma to investigate a collective and peer-led approach to developing an artists’ creative practice.  Each artist is now planning a new piece of work that will be realised, and collaboratively developed and presented in the gallery.

Fiona Moate, Naqsh Raj and Vic Wright

8-23 March 2024

Preview: Thursday 7 March 7pm-9pm

mura ma is delighted to present the late Fiona Moate, Naqsh Raj and Vic Wright.

Titled, ‘Holding Up’ the exhibition draws together artists devoted to process, place and form and have each developed their own visual language in their art-making, be it painting or sculpture.

Opening on International Women’s Day 2024, the theme of this exhibition has been inspired by the book of illustrations and writing by American artist Maira Kalman, called ‘Women Holding Things’.

“The exhibition’s premise is to celebrate the idea of women holding space for art making.  All be it a something else to hold, it is for many artists, a place in which to escape, take refuge and for creativity to flourish.  Finding that time and place to create in the clamour of everyday life of things to hold and to carry,”  Nan Collantine, Mura Ma.

Accompanying events include a Women Holding Things life drawing series – details here

A Women Holding Creative Space event is also planned for Thursday 21 March.  Further details available soon.

A solo exhibition of painting by Kate Jacob

26 January – 10 February 2024

Preview: Thursday 25 January 7pm-9pm

mura ma is delighted to present Sheffield-based artist Kate Jacob’s first solo exhibition.

In How to knit a nebula Jacob articulates through painting her attempts to trace the voids, space, and places of loss and memory.  A nebular, a giant cloud of cosmic dust and gas, is the former site of a star, but also its birthplace; a fitting description of the metaphysical time and space Jacob is reaching for in her painting.

Jacob uses a material process to knit together fragments of being, imagining the effects of time and motion inside and outside the body. It’s a world of broken, hazy lines and shapes that rise and fall allowing us to exist in both the intimate and infinite realm.

Preview: Thursday 25 January, 7pm–9pm

Talk and Taste in conversation event:  Friday 9 February 7pm-9pm.  With the artist and art historian, Sara Riccardi tasting plates created by Claire Woodier. Info and booking

16 November – 23 December 2023

Launch party: Thursday 23 November, 7pm-9pm

Presenting the rich and varied breadth of painting taking place in northern England today, Mura Ma has gathered 14 northern contemporary painters for its final exhibition of the year.  In the gallery vault, a second exhibition titled Paper Thin Skin, presents a series of works on paper by highly regarded Australian artist, Veronica Cay.

Precious Little will feature two paintings from each of the following artists;

Sue Asbury, Nan Collantine, Alison Friend, Rob Hall, Ghislaine Howard, Kate Jacob, Josie Jenkins, Joe Kiney-Whitmore, Jen Orpin, Joe O’Rourke, Georgia Peskett, Jayne Simpson, Helen Thomas, Mike Thorpe.

Paper Thin Skin works on paper by Veronica Cay

An exhibition of works on paper by Australian artist, Veronica Cay will be taking place in the gallery vault.

Cay’s arts practice engages with the contradictions inherent in contemporary life from a gendered perspective. She has spent many years developing a personal language as a vehicle to convey meaning and ideas, and as an endeavour to reflect upon what it means to be human; seeking connections, testing resilience and acknowledging frailties.  Her drawings all stem from weekly life drawing sessions – her mark making is often intuitive, both responding to the marks and/or obliterating them.

Read the review by Desmond Bullen in Northern Soul

“It’s not just a question of how to live with art, but how to live in it,”  Katie Evans, Creative Tourist

Mura Ma has invited more than 30 artists and designers to co-create an imagined home environment within the gallery, to explore the idea of the home as an artistic practice. 

“Somewhere between an expanded still life and a stage set-an invitation to participate in an imagined occupancy. A mise-en-scene.”  Kirsty Bell, author of Artist’s House

Facilitated by artists Jane Fairhurst and Nan Collantine, who have handed over the installation process to the artists themselves, Live with it will begin with a series of unseen performative elements, starting with the activation of the space with sculptures by Kat Button and Jane Fairhurst.

The gallery will be divided into rooms, intimated through the placing of items of furniture. Each room is then developed, as artists respond through the placing of an artwork and an object within their chosen space in a given time slot of 30 minutes.

Viewers will be invited to enter the created space to experience the imagined environment that mimics the ‘artists house’.

An accompanying programme of events and activities will investigate home as a place of creative endeavour, observe and discuss the practice of collecting and arranging, and explore how domestic labour and caring can be reframed as valuable creative capital.

The exhibition will evolve as art and all objects in the exhibition are available to buy and taken away, as you would in a shop.  Sold objects and artworks will be replenished on a weekly basis and different artists will be invited to place work within the installation.

image credits from the top:  Nicola Hood, Jude Wainwright, Michelle Oliver, Jane Fairhurst, Emma Jackson.

title page image:  Kat Button

Thanks to our sponsor, Ashley Aspin Decorator and Colour Consultant for supporting this exhibition.

Read the review on Creative Tourist