Attic - Elaine Collett, Elaine Mills, Judy Tinsley, June Ridgeway, Aleathea Lillitos, Imogen Bittner, Lin Walker and Mary Tambini, the members of Wesca taking part in "Attic" hope very much you will find time one weekend in October to visit this exhibition at 2 West Walks, Dorchester, DT11RE. 

Breathless - Shaftesbury Arts Centre 1st March - 14th March 2023. 14 WESCA Artists address the issues of our post pandemic world.

2022 - OUT OF THE DARK

An exhibition titled 'OUT OF THE DARK' will open over Easter week 2022 at 2 West Walks, Dorchester DT1 1RE. For more information phone 01305 260215.

2020 - ALTERED STATES

'ALTERED STATES' opened to a successful and socially distanced talk on 30th October at Guggleton Farm Arts, Stalbridge, Dorset. Unfortunately, it had to close a week later due to a second national covid-19 lockdown. GUGGLETON FARM ARTS has taken the decision to re-open the show at 11am on the 3rd December, when the lockdown is due to end.

Images taken at the socially distanced and mask wearing opening, featuring the curators 'altered state' black walls.

Click on the thumbnails below to view a larger image

2019 - ‘SIDEWAYS glance’

Exhibition at 44 AD artspace 4 ABBEY STREET, BATH, BA1 1NN

A sideways glance is often furtive, interested, hidden. It offers a whole lot of surprises.

We approach things independently yet are always interested in what the others are doing. ‘Sideways’ suggested this oblique connection, and a visit to the show attested to the variety of approach and processes used to make work.

This show celebrated the essential individual qualities of WESCA members’ work, at the same time as celebrating the subtle support and friendship in the group that helps to nurture our development.

It offers a whole lot of surprises.

2018 - BLOOMING CONTRADICTIONS - delicious, dangerous, beautiful, bad

Exhibition at Eype Centre for the Arts, near Bridport, July 28 – August 12 - 2018

Members of Wessex contemporary Arts explored the impact of plastic waste and other pollutants on the beauty of the natural world. A table of dangerous beauty was laid for visitors’ delight......

The idea of the polluted sea as 'blooming awful' was intermixed in this show with things that are blooming wonderful too!  The abundance, beauty and colour of flowers was evident in paintings, photographs, sculpture and hangings by Wesca artists (Wessex Contemporary Arts).  The church of St Peter at Eype welcomed the group again for a two- week long exhibition, and quite by chance the duality of St Peter's story was appropriate for the theme of the show 'Blooming Contradictions'.  

The show had, at its centre, a table full of dangerous delights - objects that are enticing but laced with danger, and invited the viewer to contemplate the impact of pollutants on the natural world.  Plastic was the main culprit addressed on this table and around the church, and it put viewers in the position of being duped, as marine animals are, by plastic in the wrong place.

During the exhibition there were intriguing developments.  Some Wesca artists were working on site, and the show evolved into something new during this time.  The idea of blooming as a living, developing, evolving phenomenon, in a multitude of ways, was visible as the show developed - inviting viewers to return and see it again with new eyes as it blossomed, flowered, sprouted, flourished into another version - feeding on itself and the inspiration of the wonderful space of St Peter's in Eype.

WESCA participated in Dorset Art Weeks 2018

WESCA exhibited exciting paintings, photographs, sculpture and ceramics at Vida Comida in the Swan Yard, Sherborne as a part of Dorset Art Weeks 2018. Elizabeth Adams, Aleathea Lillitos , Kevin O-Brien, Justin Orwin, Louise Roll, Jo Saurin and Helen Simpson were featured in the show, together with samples of work by other members of the group.

Pop-Up show in Sherborne

Summer 2017 - we held our first show upstairs at Vida Comida in Sherborne, a 'POP-UP' - organised fast - successful and fun.

2017 - Earth Pulse exhibition at Eype Centre for the Arts. The work by members of Wessex Contemporary Arts reflects the energy and movement of the natural world we inhabit and which we can so easily take for granted. The work is a mix of abstract and figurative, 2D and 3D all in its way challenging not only a conventional view of art, but challenging us to look again with fresh eyes at what is around us, appreciate and reflect . The exhibition was opened by Stephen Batty, we are so grateful for the wonderful talk he gave and so saddened by his recent death. In honour of him we have included it here:

WESCA Wessex Contemporary Arts

Birthdays are a time of reflection, of looking back. I'm old enough to remember that during my 59 years I've been privileged to have met three elderly people, each of them women, who, in their youth saw Thomas Hardy about his business in and around Dorchester. One of these women had a low opinion of the master writer of Dorset: on Sunday afternoons her parents would take her for walks in the Frome meadows. “But then we'd come across Mr. Hardy and he'd be sat on a stile and he wouldn't budge, so we had to find another way round the hedge to get to the footpath.” I've always been intrigued by that thought of Hardy not budging. Was it curmudgenliness? Obstinacy? Rudeness? Or was he dreaming Wessex into being? We talk about 'Hardy's Wessex' but 98 years after his death it has become our Wessex. He took the name of the old Anglo Saxon kingdom and transferred it to a Dorset and Somerset and Wiltshire and Devon and Hampshire that were of his own making. In the preface to Far From the Madding Crowd, he talks of Wessex as 'a merely realistic dream country.' There's a lovely ambiguity in that statement: 'realistic' and 'dream country' wouldn't normally be juxtaposed. Either something's real or its a dream. But in the hands of an artist, whether they be a 'word-painter' or a 'mark-maker', a dream can become real or the real can be seen as if in a dream. I hope Hardy would have been honoured by your choosing 'Wessex Contemporary Arts' as the title of your collective. I certainly believe that he'd have approved of 'Earth Pulse' as a title. In his poem The Darkling Thrush he has a line that includes the words: 'the ancient pulse of germ and birth..'

In Far From The Madding Crowd Hardy writes: 'The sky was remarkably clear – and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse..' Where there's a pulse there's a life force and it belongs not just to individual human beings but, as Hardy reminds us, there's an ancient pulse in the earth and a pulse in the sky, a 'common pulse.' Art is one of means by which we take that pulse, listen to it, respond to it.

I would like to close with a story that is, in one way, a kind of warning about the liberties that art can take: yes it is good to dream, to have flights of imagination, but at the same time there is a responsibility to be anchored in the real.

In the mid 1960s, when the film director John Schlesinger brought a crew to Dorset to make his dreamy adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel Far from the Madding Crowd, a farmer in our village was asked to supply the sheep that would appear in the scene where Gabriel Oak (played by Alan Bates) loses his livelihood as a shepherd when a wayward dog of his drives his flock over the edge of a cliff.

The story goes that when the film was premièred in Dorset there was a good number of shepherds in the audience. As Gabriel Oak's tragedy unfolded on the screen, a spontaneous and contemptuous peal of laughter filled the cinema – the shepherds had easily spotted the continuity error. The sheep corpses littering the beach were a different breed from the ones that had been harried on the cliff-top. The film makers had gone to Jack Norman's slaughterhouse at Bradpole to access the bodies of sheep without a thought to differentiation between breeds. They weren't tuned to the earth's actual pulse. Their dream was not anchored enough in reality. They thought that any old sheep would do!

Each of the shepherds who sat at that first screening of John Schlesinger's film were not going to be fooled by a drama that stopped short of specifying between the breeds they knew so well. That shepherd up there on the screen was not going to be believed by a constituency which did definitely know the difference between kinds of sheep. A rather woolly (pun intended) approach to 'sheep-ness' had overlooked particularity. And the result, in the eyes of the shepherds, was absurd: a cinematic shepherd whose flock metamorphoses even as it plunges to its doom! No wonder they laughed. Around the time that the first film of Far From the Madding Crowd was made, an American Trappist monk named Thomas Merton wrote this in celebration of things having their own unique identity:

"No two created beings are exactly alike. And their individuality is no imperfection. On the contrary, the perfection of each created thing is not merely in its conformity to an abstract type but in its own individual identity with itself.'

None of the works of art in this exhibition are exactly alike; they do not conform to an abstract type: they are unique expressions of earth's ancient pulse of germ and birth.

Stephen Batty

DURLSTON July 2015. Next Year we will be exhibiting in Durlston with an exhibition entitled "On The Edge"

Preparations are underway and we will continue to report updates as and when. It should be an exciting exhibition.

WORK IN PROGRESS - Eype Church (Centre for Arts) .

We have just completed a very successful exhibition at Eype Church. With a footfall of over 250 over the 8 days  it gained many favourable comments and several significant sales. We will be returning to Eype soon we hope as we love exhibiting there. It is quiet and off the beaten track but the exhibitions there all have a wonderful atmosphere. ( Pictures to follow soon).

ENCOUNTERS Dorset County Museum 2013. 

This exhibition was a tremendous opportunity for the group as a whole. The exhibition was centred around work inspired by artefacts and memories found in the museum and as a result the exhibition was diverse and exciting. It was well attended and of much interest to the public. Pictures below from the PV.