Previous Exhibitions
Over the years since we opened in 2009, we have had almost 70 exhibitions. Some of these are available online. We hope you will enjoy browsing these pages. If you live far from Settle, perhaps it will whet your appetite to pay us a visit. And in the summer of 2019 we staged a special tenth anniversary exhibition at the Folly Museum in Settle. It ran from July 6 to September 6 and told the story of how we established the gallery. It listed all the exhibitions; included many of the posters we used to promote them and included tributes from many of our previous exhibitors, including Brian May who has shown some of his fascinating collection of Victorian photographs on two separate occasions. The boards from the exhibition are in the NOW WE ARE TEN section of this page.
7 September – 15 November 2019
Peter Osborne first learnt to paint and draw as a boy with the bird artist Rowland Green. After two degrees, the second in Art History at the Courtauld Institute, he worked in art schools eventually becoming Head of the Blackburn School of Art and Design. He is moved by the sad sight of fine old barns sinking into decay; this exhibition of watercolours was a result.
The exhibition documented the state of out-barns in Bowland mainly in the area of Tatham Fells.
These old barns are reaching their end. Unwanted and abandoned, these lovely remains of an old way of farming life are still an important part of our heritage and of our landscape. But, Peter asks: “Who will act to save them?”
A few out-barns are well-maintained by careful farmers, as indeed are nearly all barns near road or farmstead. These latter can be used for storage of vehicles or equipment. For out-barns things are different; approachable only by path, track or just rough ground, their only use is for sheep to find occasional shelter. Such minimal use does not justify the cost to struggling farmers of re-roofing and other repair. Decay in roof timbers quickly leads to the slippage of roofing slabs. Ingress of water hastens decay and, in turn, seeps into, splits and cracks the walls.
The watercolours are the result of an effort, on long walks over field and fell, to record what is left of our ancient barns. As well as being essentially accurate depictions of their state, they are also affected by a sadness at seeing them so, particularly in their landscape importance. Almost every path in the area is enlivened by one of these features, built in the local stone by the superb craftsmen of our villages in the past.
Catalogue of Giclee Prints: O.S. 1. Starkers Barn looking towards the Lake District. 667626
- New Close Barn 648629
- Small barn under Greenbank 644619
- New Close from North West 646636
- Middle Barn. Towards Gragareth 652631
- Tunstall House Barn from the North 654668
- Fall Barn from S.E. 665628
- Fall Barn from N.W. ..
- Holmes Barn 657620
- Middle Barn, from East as 5.
- Tunstall House Barn, towards Gragareth as 6.
- Barn by Bridleway from Ashleys 626682
- Rantree Fold Barn 658648
- Demolition of barn under Brackenbottom 657648
- Holmes Barn as 9.
- Interior, New Close as 4.
- Crow Gill Barn in Snow 642654
- Bent Close 650653
- Ruined Barn by Footpath from Lowgill Lane 642655
- Willy Close Barn towards Bowland Forest 673651
- Barn by Clearbeck 624681
- Green Hall Barn 667653
- Far Holme 647653
- Barn Remains near Haw Wood 641660
- Barn by Coat Bank Coppice 618693
- Mewith Barn …………
- Remains of Low House Barn 652635
- Higher Craggs 668645
- Creams Barn 630663
- Barn Remains below Park House 637664
31 Helks Wood Barn 646654
- Small barn at Whiteray 665622
- Green Hall Barn as 22
- Fall Barn, towards Lythe as 7.
- Swans Wood 658632
- Starkers from West as 1
- Holmes from Dixons as 9
- Swans Track 658632
- On Ashleys bridleway 626684
- Barn at Mewith
Watercolours:
i.Stirk Close ii. Falls Barn (Botton)
iii. Fall Barn (Lythe) from Greenbank
iv New Barn, Hindburn Headwaters
NOTE FROM THE ARTIST
PRINTS AND WATERCOLOURS
Given the slight possibility of damp in the telephone box, most images have been displayed as giclee prints. These may be purchased. Please send a letter enclosing the catalogue number(s) of print(s) required and a £10 note per print, I will then post a print to your address. My address is: Clearbeck House, Tatham, Lancaster, LA2 8PJ.
7 July to 6 September 2019
at the Folly Museum, Victoria Street, Settle BD24 9EY
Ten years ago, in the summer of 2009, the world was starting to come to terms with the previous year’s global financial crash that threatened the deepest recession since the 1930s. The years of austerity still lay ahead, but for a brief time a former BT telephone box on the Green in Settle managed to create a few headlines with the opening of the world’s smallest art gallery (probably).
Guinness (the book of records that is) would not give official recognition to the claim to be the world’s smallest, so the Gallery turned to another brewer and took a leaf out of the Carlsberg advertising book by adding (probably) to our claim to be the world’s smallest art gallery.
Over the past decade we have gone from strength to strength with a remarkable range of exhibitions. International artists have risen to challenge of showing their work in a box that can only accommodate a couple of visitors at a time, and so too have local school students. We’ve had moth photographs and the all-knitted twelve days of Christmas, and of course Brian May – twice.
The story of our first decade was recorded in a special exhibition that went on show throughout this summer at the Folly Museum in Settle, just a few hundred yards down the road from the Gallery.
’10 Years of the Gallery on the Green’ was an exhibition celebrating our first ten years, with displays from our many artists from all over the world, reflections on what it meant to them, to our visitors and to Settle.
Here are some of the boards that went to make up the Folly exhibition, alongside some examples of the works we have shown, including the all knitted twelve days of Christmas; our visitor books; comments from exhibitors; and examples of the media coverage.
The exhibition boards
Mary Woolf celebrates the opening of her Yorkshire Dales exhibition
6 July – 6 September 2019
To celebrate Gallery on the Green’s 10th anniversary, artist Mary Woolf created new works based on her experience of the colours and landscape of the Yorkshire Dales. These were displayed on the outside of the box alongside works from her original series, also titled The Yorkshire Dales, utilising the uniqueness of a telephone box as a gallery space.
Mary is a 24 year old photographic artist currently living and working in Settle. Her work explores ideas surrounding perception and experience, in addition to the ontology of photography. Her aim is to inspire people to look a little bit more closely at their surroundings and to take a little bit more notice of the experience of being in a place. At the time of the exhibition she was also working on a commission for artwork for new boundary signage into Craven District.
Mary achieved a first class honours degree in photographic arts from the University of Westminster in 2016, and subsequently moved to Horton-in-Ribblesdale to continue working on her award winning final major project entitled ‘The Yorkshire Dales’, as well as other work centred around this landscape. She says of her series The Yorkshire Dales:
“My experience of the Yorkshire Dales landscape is these amazing colours. But a photograph of this landscape shares too much information. I do not want to share all this detail. I do not care about the minutia, I only want to share the colours I notice, the colours that I experience this landscape through.
Light is colour and colour is light, they are one and the same. A photograph, by definition, is light captured by a photo-sensitive (light-sensitive) surface. Societally we have come to know photographs as being such highly detailed and accurate depictions of the world, that we no longer notice the photographs themselves.
Through my frustration with photographs giving away too much information, I isolated my chosen colours captured by my photo-sensitive surface – the sensor in my digital camera – and worked with just these colours to build up images representing how I experience the Dales; and by the aforementioned definition, these images are photographs, just not as we expect them to look.”
Mary Woolf
The original Yorkshire Dales series
24 May – 6 July 2019
No it’s not a mirage. This exhibition brought the Sahara Desert to Settle.
Artist and children’s illustrator Diane Simcoe explained how she came to take this remarkable collection of photographs in January 2009.
“A casual conversation by a dirty river in east London led to a big adventure riding shotgun in a vintage 4 wheel drive from Here to Timbuktu.
“Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Mali national borders fade while the rich colours of the Saharan people grow brighter every mile.
“Bedouin, Sahrawis, Fulani, Dogon, Songhay, Bambara, Tuareg, Kel Tamasheq, the photographs tried to capture something of the generosity, humour, rich cultural textures and joyful sense of community of the Saharan people.”
After leaving a ukulele and a piece of her heart in the desert she hopes to return one day.
Diane now lives in Settle and joined the Gallery on Green team in 2018.
18 March – 19 May 2019
The artist Carine Brosse transformed the phone box into an enchanting world of strange flying creatures.
Made out of collage and mixed media, the inhabitants of this magical space were a display of colour and cheerful exuberance.
Carine is a multi-disciplinary artist, whose previous work has included large scale outdoor installations for the Grassington Festival. But on this occasion she used collage and mixed media within the confines of the gallery’s limited space.
Born in France, Carine moved to the UK at the age of 20, eventually settling in Grassington. She took a degree in fine art at Leeds Metropolitan University and now runs the Wishbone Gallery in Grassington with ceramicist David Ashby. The two each have a workshop on the site.
Over the past 13 years Carine’s work has been included in thirty different exhibitions, mainly across Yorkshire but including the Leeds Revised show in Dortmund Germany.
Carine at work
