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.
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
12 January – 17 March 2019
Our gallery has occupied a space beside the Green in Settle since 2009. It was a telephone box for many decades before that. But long before telephone boxes became a feature of the urban, and indeed the rural landscape, in fact just twenty years after the invention of the telephone, a sycamore tree was planted in the middle of the Green to mark Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee.
The tree is now mature and dominates the Green. It has long fascinated Elaine Sargeson who has lived in Upper Settle for the past 18 years. She has photographed the tree from different angles and in different seasons. Her work formed this exhibition.
Elaine writes: “The Jubilee Tree has interested me since I became aware of its magestic beauty the first summer I moved to the green.
“I noticed walkers often stopped and after reading the plaque informing them that the tree was planted in 1897 to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, they would sit beneath it to enjoy the view of Attermire.
“Back then the tree hosted up to fifteen jackdaw/ crow nests each spring. This year, for the first time since I moved here,there were none. Gradually the number of nests has dropped, last year there were just two. This spring’s harsh gales and snow possibly stopped the corvids nesting.
“The Jubliee Tree is a Sycamore. It is late, by most standards, to come into leaf. It appears to lose its leaves overnight in autumn when a sudden wind robs it of its still, green leaves. In winter the tree has a quality of its own, even when the tracery of branches are bare it draws the eye upwards.
“I began to take photos of the tree in January and decided to take at least one a month for a year. Some of the photos are taken from the green and one or two from my bedroom window. One is taken from a friend’s window. I have tried to capture the tree from all angles,in sunshine and in rain, with blue skies and with grey. Sometimes beautiful sunsets have provided the backdrop.
Without the Jubilee Tree the Green would be a different place, everyone loved it.
Let’s hope The Jubliee Tree is still fascinating and pleasing people in another hundred years.”
10 November 2018 – 11 January 2019
Many walkers know Ingleborough as the last and most challenging of the Yorkshire Three Peaks.
But there is much more to this hill than the average walker sees.
The collection of photographs that made up this exhibition illustrate how people live, enjoy and work on and around the peak.
The photographs, taken by resident Hilary Fenten, were a snapshot in time of the area’s social history, showing how people – locals and visitors – connect to the land and its communities.
The collection included a wide representation of jobs, trades, characters and events throughout the Ingleborough area and through the changing seasons.
A number of historical images, from the Back in Settle and Capturing the Past collections, were displayed alongside the portraits, to show how some things clearly change while others seem to remain constant.
This exhibition was funded through the Ingleborough Dales Landscape Partnership, led by Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust, and supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.
The exhibition at the Gallery completed a series of showings across North Craven that began at the Folly in Settle in September 2018 and included displays at both Ribblehead and Horton in Ribblesdale railway stations. The display at the Gallery was specially designed to ensure that the story of the area’s big hill fits into our own small gallery.
