Culture in Norwich: In Proximity

Culture in Norwich: In Proximity

Not only an iconic Norwich landmark, Norwich Castle is home to a wonderful gallery space, showcasing well-known names and contemporary artists alike!  

Now, it’s showing In Proximity, an open art show in partnership with the East Anglia Art Fund, which displays the works of 87 local artists in response to the theme of ‘closeness’. From ceramics and sculpture to painting, inks and even smoke, each piece interprets the theme in its own interesting and exciting way. They’re ideas that many visitors may relate and feel close to themselves.

Here we speak to Dr Amanda Geitner, Director of East Anglia Art Fund, to find out more about this engaging exhibition and the creativity of our region.

Image: Maria Pavledis, Bear, 2023, smoke on paper © Maria Pavledis

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In Proximity is the 7th Open Art Show developed by the East Anglia Art Fund (EAAF) with Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery across 20 years. Each time we think that this is the best Open Art Show yet, and perhaps we are right. This year, the exhibition includes 93 works by 87 artists from East Anglia and is generously supported by Jarrolds. 

The great thing about an Open Art Show is the openness. The idea is that artists of any age, working in any medium can submit a work of art for possible selection by our guest selectors to be shown in the Victorian galleries of Norwich Castle.  

For In Proximity, artist Daniel & Clara and writer and curator Sarah Lowndes were the selectors, alongside myself and Dr Lisa Newby, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Norwich Castle. The theme we offered was intentionally broad. In Proximity might address the things close to you in the home, garden or studio, or it might refer to more formal concerns within an artwork, suggesting how different shapes or colours operate together. Ultimately, our theme captures the nature of an exhibition. Works of art can be very self-sufficient objects, containing within them a world of their own making, however, they do something very different when you put them together and see how they get along in proximity.  

At the entrance to the exhibition, Maria Pavledis’s marvellous standing Bear holds court with a menagerie of animals of the imagination. There’s a disarmingly soft and round Mole by Rebecca Riess, Tessa Newcomb’s goats, Robert Sherratt’s perfectly observed Museum Birds (painted from the Castle’s own displays) and at either side, Nessie Stonebridge’s beasts and birds caught in fight and flight and the tumult of Emma Withers’ fantastic Family of Lions.  

Many artists have captured people too. Sue Maufe’s procession of tiny figures, Trafficking, draws you in with their diminutive charm, but they offer a heartbreaking account of migration and dislocation. Malca Shotten’s drawing of Mother & Child is based on visitors at the Sainsbury Centre. It is a lovely observation of the act of looking.   

Across the room, there are fabulous depictions of landscapes: you can explore daybreak captured in Neil Bousfield’s exquisite wood engraving, The Rising Sun, fall into Amanda Ansell’s swirling dark waters in Sparkle, and gaze at Philip Walmsley’s Moon Series no. 7. 

I also adore the perfect fragility of Gwyneth Fitzmaurice’s Stem with Seven Stalks, a little fragment of a branch that is realistically fashioned with papier-mâché. It sits beautifully with the marvellous tangle of tree branches in Alex Egan’s painting Mother (look closely and there is so much more life in the tree than we might expect). 

In the next gallery, there is a wall of still lines, geometry and colour. Mary Mellor’s hard-edged painted triangles combine to make Mellow Square. They lead to the perfect saturation of pink in Brenda Unwin’s watercolour, Magenta Quinacridone, Quinacridone Gold, and on to the constructed forms of Jack Crampton’s Tryst and Telfer Stokes’ Vecta.  

Some works are hidden in plain sight. A fire extinguisher sits low at the end of a wall, a ubiquitous piece of emergency apparatus that is so familiar that it escapes notice. But this one is different. It is a work in porcelain by Rollo Timothy George. A life-size replica of a real fire extinguisher, its surface collaged with film skins lifted from dozens of Polaroids of the original. How? Why? I don’t exactly know, but it is brilliant and I am so glad to have it in the exhibition.  

Mike Fenton’s painting Broken, Empty addresses ideas of closeness in many different ways. A tumble of discarded objects, from action figures to charging cables, are strewn across a table that seems to tip forward, threatening to dump everything on the floor. It’s a very close visual correlation to one of Norwich Castle’s most celebrated grand paintings, the 17th Century Paston Treasure, which is on display just a short distance away. 

The works in In Proximity will never be together again. Many have sold and they will disperse to their new homes and back to studios when the exhibition closes on June 14. Come and see them. The exhibition offers wonderful insight to the brilliant work being made in our region now. 

Norwich Castle Open Art Show, In Proximity, is on show at Norwich Castle from 14 February to 14 June 2026. The exhibition was selected anonymously from an open call by writer and curator Sarah Lowndes and artist Daniel & Clara, alongside Amanda Geitner, Director of EAAF, and Lisa Newby, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery.  

Norwich Castle is open daily, 10am – 5pm. In Proximity is included in museum admission, adults from £15.30, children from £13.05, twilight ticket 1 hour before closing £2.