Our current exhibition, Philippa Sutherland | Paintings, is on show at Drawing Projects UK from 23 May to 13 June 2026. The exhibition presents an extensive group of unseen paintings by the late Philippa Sutherland, who was a studio holder at Drawing Projects UK from 2015-2025. 

Philippa Sutherland: Born in Bradford-on-Avon, Philippa Sutherland studied at the University of St Andrews, Epsom College of Art & Design and Central Saint Martins, London. After initially working as a librarian at Middlesex Polytechnic, she returned to education to study drawing and illustration. She later moved into art and design education, teaching in London, Denmark and Ireland. She eventually settled in Ireland, where she completed an MA in Fine Art at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, in 2004.

Philippa exhibited widely throughout Ireland and the UK, with solo exhibitions at the Paul Kane Gallery, Dublin, the Ashford Gallery (RHA), Dublin, and Mermaid Arts Centre, Wicklow, alongside numerous group exhibitions including Dig Where You Stand at South Tipperary Museum, Monochrome at Lavit Gallery, Cork, and Summer’s Lease at Eagle Gallery, London.

She returned to the UK in 2015 to care for her ailing parents and became a studio holder at Drawing Projects UK in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, where she was a valued and much-loved presence within the artistic community. Her paintings and drawings reflect a deeply attentive sensibility: works that move between observation and memory, structure and atmosphere, often carrying a quiet emotional intensity.

This exhibition brings together a group of previously unseen paintings and sketchbooks, offering a rare opportunity to encounter the breadth and subtlety of her work following her untimely death in 2025.

Notes to Pip by Sylvia Shortall


There are houses. 

There is a house - a symbol for a house, the archetype perched on a hill.

Houses in woods, in trees, through the trees, viewed from above, viewed from afar.
 Tented houses, covered in drifts of snow, through the trees, belonging to the landscape.
Nightscapes: that liminal time between the beginning and the end - a chilly twilight. 
A pendulous headland, one headland touching another.
 Silhouettes and mirror like rivers, negative & positive spaces coalescing, sharing contours,
 appearing and disappearing.


Painterly renditions, the landscape reading as body. Even your landscapes are feminine. 
Girls lounge unaware that they have been captured.
Your young women pause, pose - caught wistfully, caught in a moment in time, forever 
frozen. Painted, blurred, their faces sometimes finished, or obscured - never drawn yet total 
presence.


You made these paintings; that bleached out northern sunlight, girls in their teenage phase
 of life.


We never have the full picture of these young women - I say girls, adolescent, I feel that they 
are on the cusp of something and trying to find their way in the world.
 It’s a mindset, a stage of life not a chronological age: chasing dreams, aspirations, 
remembering life experiences.


It’s all very Northern European and can feel a bit like a Scandi-noir.
 What is left unsaid in those bleached out spaces. 
Drawing with paint.
 Drawing is touching space.
 Trying to feel in the dark - trying to find a word, not a word, but an image that goes before 
words - preempts language, an image that makes sense of … or tries to understand a 
situation.


Why do we draw?
 We draw to understand ourselves, we are relational beings.
 When I draw you, I understand myself, in relation: to you, my distance, my space in the 
world. I become closer to making my dreamscapes, my imagination a reality.
 Some of these women/girls/ … are lost in reverie, in their own worlds. 
I can see where you had fun with the garments: the suggestiveness of fabric, the weight and 
texture of it - how they move on the body - garments are about identity and, a bit like your 
signature, signing your name. 
Saying yes, I was here. 
This is me.

Sylvia Shortall is an artist and Lecturer at Limerick College of Art & Design. A friend of Philippa, Sylvia this text is written in response to works included in the exhibition, and is seen by the author as a kind of communication with Philippa about her paintings and drawings.

VISITOR INFORMATION:
Exhibition Preview | Sunday 24 May from 1pm to 3pm
Closing Reception | Saturday 13 June from 1pm to 3pm

Please RSVP for these events by email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

OPENING HOURS:
The exhibition is open to the public on Wednesdays, Fridays & Saturdays, 10am to 3pm, and is free to see. 

The exhibition is installed throughout our galleries, which means you can also see elements of the exhibition on display in The Entrance Hall and Long Galleries whenever ArtHaus Coffee at Drawing Projects UK is open: ArtHaus opening hours are on Weekdays: Monday-Wednesday and Friday from 8am to 4pm (closed Thursdays); and weekends from 10am to 3pm.

Works are for sale, please contact us by email for all enquiries: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Getting to Drawing Projects UK: We are located by the train station in Trowbridge with regular services to major cities and towns, and there are multiple public car parks nearby.

We look forward to welcoming everyone to this beautiful exhibition. 

--ENDS--