Committees - Penlee House

Penlee House

The Penlee House Committee deals with all matters relating to the management of Penlee House Gallery & Museum.

Penlee House is a unique cultural venue, at the heart of the whole community, with an important collection of paintings by the internationally-renowned Newlyn School and Lamorna artists, as well as a large collection of artefacts celebrating the archaeological and social history of West Cornwall.

The Penlee House Committee establishes service policies, approves programmes of work, monitors performance, and takes decisions in respect of those matters detailed in the approved budget.

Over the past year, the Committee has continued to approve the implementation of actions from the 2021 independent review of Penlee House. This has included developing fundraising and commercial strategies, and co-opting specialist advisors to the Penlee House Committee.

The last year’s highlights

A highlight of this year was the Penlee Inspired exhibition -a crowd-sourced exhibition, open to everyone. Submission to the exhibition was open to all ages and abilities, from beginners to professional artists, and work could be in any medium, including creative writing. The only brief was that the works submitted were inspired by the Penlee House collections and exhibitions.

Artist-led workshops helped to get members of the public inspired and we had our biggest response ever, with school children, students, care home residents and professional artists all entering! Artist-led partnerships with Camborne Deaf Church, Morrab Surgery Social Prescribing Group, The John Daniel Centre and Humphry Davy School led to some great submissions and the range of work was phenomenal, with paintings, drawings and animation alongside poetry and creative writing. It was a challenge to decide which artworks would be included, with the Gallery showing more artworks than ever before in this exhibition!

Another highlight was The Museum of Carefree, an exhibition celebrating the work of Carefree Cornwall The exhibition was curated by and featured artwork created by care-experienced young people. It was a thought provoking and uplifting exhibition, celebrating over four years of partnership working between Penlee House, artist Emma Saffy Wilson, Cornish Museums and charity Carefree Cornwall.

Tim Treagust - inspired by Lamorna Birch's 'In Our Old World Valley' (part of the Penlee Inspired exhibition 2022)

Tim Treagust

Penlee House Gallery & Museum entrance