FFIONA LEWIS
To the Horkey
FFIONA LEWIS
FFIONA LEWIS
To the Horkey
FFIONA LEWIS
Susan Moore
Words are important to Ffiona Lewis. A snatch of dialogue, a phrase from a book, a cadence. Words often trigger a painting, or tumble out of one. They are points of departure that describe the arc of a body of work, a vocabulary built to investigate a subject. ‘To the Horkey’, the title of this exhibition, speaks of nature and the way of life in the corner of rural Suffolk that has been the artist’s home for a decade. An archaic, dialect term, ‘Horkey’ was the feasting and frolicking that celebrated the bringing in of the harvest in East Anglia. While its customs have long disappeared, the word remains resonant for Lewis. For the age-old, seasonal husbandry of the land still supports her neighbouring farmers, food producers, weavers and spinners, and continues to shape the landscape. This body of work, made during lockdown, is a response to place, community and breaking bread.
Everything begins in notebooks and sketchbooks. (An unbound ream or pad of paper just does not do: ‘There is something about being confined by the spine’, and the double-page spreads of open pages have prompted the painted diptychs here.) She might take a walk and note a snippet of conversation, an observation, a sound, or take as a starting point an object, image or pattern from home. From that kernel, overlaid by the spoken word of poetry or history constantly playing in her studio, an idea begins to gestate and sources fuse. First come small sketches in pencil and then in colour - wax crayon or watercolour. Once liberated from their bindings, these sketches may become works of art in their own right. Two here, both interiors, set the trajectory of this exhibition.
A bowl of fruit and a clutch of textiles was the starting point of The Horkey and Other Feasts [pl. 15]. Produce may be a traditional metaphor for nature’s abundance, but it is not the raison d’être of the sketch. This crayon, pencil and watercolour launched an exploration of how to render an object by painting what is around it, painting it from the background in, so to speak. It is also about colour. For her last body of work, based around plant structures, Lewis restricted herself to a very limited palette. She felt it clipped her wings and wanted to try some new colour relationships and really push them. Red is a new colour for her, red in all its variations: Alizarin Crimson, Purple Madder, Scarlet Lake, Cadmium Red. The collage aspect of this sketch was a means of testing how reds sit with other hues. ‘Each zone has a different opportunity to attack it,’ she explained. Her choice of verb reflects the fast, almost violent execution of the piece, her pigment spilling and splashing. She almost looked away when she produced it, the mark-making and voids already set clearly in her mind.
Studio Table with Garden Door [pl. 3] opened up a rich and vibrant seam. The motif of a table before a window allowed for a combination of still-life observation and landscape observation, and of the different rendering of plants - growing, cut and already depicted – which spilled out of the page and evolved into paintings large and small. Its playful patternmaking expanded to embrace not only the randomly placed zig-zag strokes of parquet flooring but also the animated swirls of fabrics, the feathery loops of table veneers and the grids of table-legs and chairs awaiting their sitters. Again, objects are defined by their
Red Velvet 2024
Mixed media on paper
23 × 15 cm right 2
Blue Planting on Crimson 2024
Oil on gesso board
50 × 60 cm
neighbouring colour, structures and the spaces between them are ambiguous. Pots disappear in the pattern of a tablecloth, flowers into flock wallpaper. Vessels teeter. There is movement in that plant-pot on its pedestal, a dynamic reflected in the titles of her paintings: To the Lunch Table [pl. 46], To the Blue Door [pl. 12] (there is no door, blue or otherwise).
That dynamic is part of the artist’s process too. There is something of a laboratory about Lewis’s studio. The bench, just the right height for working at standing up, is laid out with everything she may need: notebooks, sketchbooks, water, watercolours, wax crayons and pencils. Large, paintencrusted easels are set on wheels, as is the palette desk. Lewis moves to and fro to consult, draw or jot. The heavy easels are pushed aside in order that she may begin her paintings on the floor, working with long and short brushes and all her paints beside her. It is only when they the gesso boards or canvases are almost fully resolved that they are moved to the wall or easel to be painted vertically.
The painting, too, must be manouvreable. When all the proverbial plates are spinning, a painting may be completed in a single, glorious session. At other times, the artist returns to an unfinished work and finds herself unable to get back into it, and a whole section is scraped away. Board has the advantage of allowing itself to be scraped quite brutally. Oddly, these scraped and repainted passages, where the ghost of the previous painting is allowed to remain, are often the most successful. This visible layering, as in Blue Planting on Crimson [pl. 2], throws up enigmatic touches and corners of luscious pigment.
The translation from sketch to large-scale canvas diptych is also interesting in terms of palette. After thirty years of working with chalk pastels, Lewis found she had become
intolerant to the material and has turned instead to working with children’s crayons. The stridency of, say, the fluorescent tangerine and turquoise in sketches such as Studio Table with Garden Door is not replicated for Epistle on Orange [pl. 17]. Yet, ever glass half full, Lewis finds she likes the limitations of her new medium and seeks to recreate the zing of its contrasts, just as she attempts to recapture the fleeting glimpse that first stopped her in her tracks. The show offers paeons of praise not only to the combinations of orange and blue but also to ultramarine and lemon yellow, and to the reds and yellows, greens and blues from The Horkey and Other Feasts celebrated in Sunshine through Red Larch [pl. 20], Orchard Whips on Ochre [pl. 14] and To the Lunch Table. The show really is Horkey – A Feast of Pattern [pl. 9].
March, 2025
An art historian, critic and art market commentator, Susan Moore is Associate Editor of Apollo and has written columns for the Financial Times, The Spectator and the London Evening Standard. She founded the not-for-profit Slow Art Workshop in 2017 and is currently writing a monograph on the American Fauvist artist Anne Estelle Rice (1887-1959).
Studio Table with Garden Door 2025
Wax crayon on paper
23 × 15 cm 4
Sky Blue Window 2025
Wax crayon on paper
23 × 15 cm
Garden Lawn 2025
Wax crayon on paper
23 × 15 cm
Table with Garden Window 2025
Wax crayon on paper
23 × 15 cm
Anemone Window 2025
Oil on gesso board
60 × 50 cm
Embroidered Table; Landscape Window 2025
Oil on gesso board
60 × 50 cm
Horkey – A Feast of Pattern 2025
Oil on board
92.5 × 102.5 cm following spread
Harmony in Blue Studio 2025
Oil on canvas, diptych
152 × 244 cm
A Feast of Pattern 2024
Mixed media on paper
29.5 × 42 cm right
To the Blue Door 2024
Oil on canvas, diptych
75 × 120 cm
Pink Pine Poliphony 2024
Mixed media on paper
23 × 15 cm right 14
Orchard Whips on Ochre 2025
Oil on board
92.5 × 102.5 cm
The Horkey and Other Feasts 2024
Mixed media on paper
29.5 × 42 cm
Chiffchaffs 2024
Mixed media on paper
29.5 × 42 cm
17
Epistle on Orange 2024
Oil on canvas, diptych 152 × 196 cm
18 Winter Wood Stacks 2025
Oil on gesso board
30 × 24 cm
Dead Wood; Live Wood 2025
Oil on gesso board
30 × 24 cm
Sunshine through Red Larch 2024 Oil on gesso board 24 × 30 cm
21
Golden Birch Bank 2025
Oil on gesso board
24 × 30 cm
22
East Coast Pine 2025
Wax crayon on paper
23 × 15 cm
23
Into the Evening Woods 2025
Wax crayon on paper
23 × 15 cm
24
Grey Pine Riverbank 2025
Wax crayon on paper
23 × 15 cm
25 Pine Saplings 2025
Wax crayon on paper
23 × 15 cm
Picnic Pear Platter 2024
Oil on gesso board
30 × 24 cm
Red Rose Still Life 2024
Oil on gesso board
30 × 24 cm
Evening Blue Lace 2025
on canvas, diptych
×
Veneer Tables with Garden Window 2025
on canvas, diptych
× 200 cm
Sumptuous Red Velvet 2024
Oil on gesso board
24 × 30 cm
Night Window Still Life 2024
Oil on gesso board
24 × 30 cm
Red Campion, Lemon Yellow 2024
Oil on gesso board
30 × 24 cm
Scots Pine Embankment 2024
Oil on gesso board
30 × 24 cm
Punchy Pine Plantings 2025
Oil on board
92.5 × 102.5 cm
Oil on gesso board, triptych
× 72 cm
Pond Panoramic 2024
Oil on gesso board, triptych
× 72 cm
Thyme Walk 2025
Oil on gesso board, triptych 30 × 72 cm
Willow Whips 2024
Oil on gesso board
50 × 60 cm
On Pond Life 2025
Oil on gesso board, diptych
80 × 120 cm
Red House; Farmhouse 2024 Oil on gesso board 40 × 50 cm
Still Life with Postcard 2024
Oil on gesso board
40 × 50 cm
On Crimson Cloth 2025
Oil on gesso board
60 × 50 cm
Evening Studio Plant 2025
Oil on gesso board
50 × 60 cm
Lazy Daisy 2024
Mixed media on paper
29.5 × 21 cm right 46
To the Lunch Table 2025
Oil on board
92.5 × 102.5 cm
Bumblebee Mix 2024
Mixed media on paper
29.5 × 42 cm
A Suffolk Sward 2024
Mixed media on paper
29.5 × 42 cm
Not so Secret Garden Door 2025
on board
92.5 × 102.5 cm
50 Spring Flower Buds 2025 Oil on gesso board
50 × 60 cm
51 Cups, Cups, Cups! 2024
Oil on gesso board
50 × 60 cm
Green Grow the Rushes, O! 2025
Oil on gesso board, diptych
80 × 120 cm
Still Life in Three 2024
Mixed media on paper
29.5 × 42 cm
Delphinium Blue 2025
Oil on gesso board, diptych
120 × 80 cm
FFIONA LEWIS
Lewis spent her formative years in South Devon.
She went on to study architecture at the Polytechnic of Central London.
Worked as a qualified architect; studied at Central St Martins School of Art; worked at the ‘Paintframe’ and Props Departments at the Royal National Theatre.
She has been represented by The Redfern Gallery, London since 1996. Lewis now works predominantly in Suffolk.
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2025 An Exhibition for a Festival and onstage banners, The 24th Aldeburgh Literary Festival
2023 Harris Machair, Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh
2020 The Green Tapestry, The Redfern Gallery, London
2018 Ffiona Lewis: Summer Field, Dovecote Studio and Concert Hall Galleries, Snape Proms 2018
2017 New Studio, North House Gallery, Manningtree, Essex
2016 Tide Lines, Belgrave Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall
2015
New Works, The Redfern Gallery, London
2014 On the Table: Collage and Painting, Belgrave Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall
2012 Fieldbook, Belgrave Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall
Estuary Field-Book, Snape Maltings Proms 2012
Figurine and Landscape, The Redfern Gallery, London
2010 Summer Studio, Cornwall, Belgrave Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall
2009 Two Coasts, Belgrave Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall Paintings from The Pumphouse, The Redfern Gallery, London
Open Studio Exhibition at The Pumphouse, 62nd Aldeburgh Music Festival 2009
North House Gallery, Manningtree, Essex
2007 The Redfern Gallery, London
2005 The Redfern Gallery, London
2004/02 The Lynne Strover Gallery, Cambridge
2003 The Redfern Gallery, London
2001 The Redfern Gallery, London
Sligo Art Gallery, Ireland
1999 The Redfern Gallery, London
1994 Gallerie H.P. Linde, Copenhagen
1993 The Royal National Theatre, London
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2025/24/23/21 First Light Festival Exhibition, Kensington Gardens, Lowestoft
2023 Unconsumed, The Shoe Factory, Norwich
2019 Romantics, St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery, Hampshire
2022/21/19/18 Estuary, Natural Beauty, Shore, Comucoppia, North House Gallery, Manningtree, Essex
2018 Coast, St Barb Museum & Art Gallery, Hampshire
The Arborealists, Black Swan Arts, Frome, Somerset
Estuary, North House Gallery, Manningtree, Essex
Inheritance, Norwich Castle, East Anglia Art Fund
2017 The Arborealists: The Art of Trees 2017, Art Bermondsey Project Space, London
Capture the Castle, Southampton City Art Gallery
2016 The Arborealists: The Art of the Tree, St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery, Hampshire
2015 Arborealists: The Art of Trees, Mottisfont Abbey
2014 Arboretum – The Art of Trees; the Arborealists and other Artists, RWA Bristol
2014/11/06/04 Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London
2013 Under the Greenwood, St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery and Southampton City Art Gallery
2011 Artists for Kettle's Yard, Cambridge
2009 – 11 The Fry Gallery, Saffron Walden
2007 – 18 London Art Fair, Islington (The Redfern Gallery)
2006 The Painted Pot, Newport Museum and Art Gallery
2000 – 11 The Discerning Eye, The Mall Galleries, London
1994 – 06 The Wills Lane Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall
1996 Dartington Art Gallery, Devon (with Rachel Nicholson)
PUBLICATIONS
A New Suffolk Garland – Edited by Elizabeth Burke, Dan Franklin and John and Mary James
Ffiona Lewis: The Green Tapestry – Essay by Dr Ian Massey (The Redfern Gallery, London)
Ffiona Lewis: Summer Field – Essay by Dr Ian Massey (The Redfern Gallery, London)
Capture the Castle (Sansom & Company)
Compendium – Eleven Spitalfields
On the Marshes by Carol Donaldson. Book cover (Little Toller Books)
Ffiona Lewis: New Works – Essay by Frances Spalding (The Redfern Gallery, London)
The Arborealists: The Art of the Tree (Sansom & Company)
The Angel Cantata by Jennifer Potter. Book illustrations (Full Circle Editions)
Under the Greenwood – Foreword by Richard Mabey (Sansom & Company)
Figurine and Landscape – Essay by Andrew Lambirth (The Redfern Gallery, London)
Flower Box and Light Box – Essays by Andrew Lambirth
Ffiona Lewis: Drawn Out of Elsewhere – Essays by Hugh Haughton, Claudia Roden and Gregorio Magnani
COLLECTIONS
House of Lords, Palace of Westminster
Slaughter & May Headquarters, London and New York
ING Barings, London
and Seascape
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Evie Milsom. And of course special, special thanks to Crispin Kelly.
FFIONA LEWIS To the Horkey
All works of art ©Ffiona Lewis, 2025
Published by The Redfern Gallery, London, 2025
Essay
Susan Moore © 2025
Catalogue design
Graham Rees Design
Photography Works: Hannah Milsom
Installation photographs of Westhill Farm and Garden: Hannah Milsom and Evie Milsom Portraits of Ffiona Lewis: Hannah Milsom
Printed in Belgium Graphius
ISBN: 978-0-948460-94-4
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