New Art Exhibitions at Pelham House

Rosie Birtwhistle - New Memories Lucy Owen - Heirlooms 2nd June – 12th July 2011 Rosie Birtwhistle Rosie Birtwhistle paintings have always been about pattern. Not just pattern as ornament, but because patterns make good symbols for our complex lives: repetition, rhythm, harmonies and balance, and then broken patterns, fragments and connections. Previously Rosie has explored such ideas as mazes, gardens cityscapes with surreal qualities. Recently Rosie has made abstract developments of these representational pictures, offering the narrative without specific imagery. This is the first showing of the new abstract paintings. The work is detailed and intimate, inviting the viewer into the pictures to experience them as puzzles or as meditational games. Rosie Birtwhistle studied at Wimbledon and Brighton Art Colleges and at Sussex and Reading Universities and has widely exhibited internationally for many years. Rosie lives and works in East Grinstead.

Lucy Owen In her first solo exhibition in Lewes, emerging artist Lucy Owen presents us with the nostalgia of the future. Whilst living in South Africa, Owen was, for the first time, looking at Britain as an outsider - an outsider in a very specific post-colonial context. Alongside this new phenomenon there was South Africa's post-apartheid obsession with nation-building and constructing a new identity - it is intrinsic, it is simply not possible to live there and be a-political. On her return to England, Owen found herself an alien in a familiar yet foreign land, and she was at once fascinated and appalled by the apathy of her English peers.