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. 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.

Philippa Sutherland’s work looks at ideas of escape to a utopian, rural life. Her practice draws on ideas from popular and high culture (music, film, literature, print-media, documents from public and private archives) to produce work which is concerned with how we construct stories from fragmentary evidence to make sense of experience. In many works she references imagery from the disparate sources of reportage, fashion magazines and newspapers to develop a series of paintings whose sequential arrangement and associated visual characteristics - ambiguous use of paint strokes and a largely subdued palette – seek to allow for the projection by a viewer of an unreliable, subjective narrative.

The exhibition is accompanied by the text below written by Sylvia Shortfall in response to the works included in the exhibition, and is seen by the author as a kind of communication with Philippa about her paintings and drawings. 

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 & the end - a chilly twilight. 
A pendulous headland, one headland touching another.
 Silhouettes & mirror like rivers, negative & positive spaces coalescing, sharing contours,
 appearing & 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 & 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 & 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 & a bit like your 
signature signing your name. 
Saying yes, I was here. 
This is me.

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. 

Sylvia Shortall is an artist and Lecturer at Limerick College of Art & Design.

VISITOR INFORMATION:
There will be an Exhibition Preview on Sunday 24 May from 1pm to 3pm and a Closing Reception on Saturday 13 June from 1pm to 3pm. Please let us know if you are attending 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--