SCAR
Cutting through the land

Free Entry

November 16th, 2025 – February 22nd, 2026

This exhibition (and the accompanying free programme) is the culmination of a project by 11 artists currently working in Cumbria who were commissioned to work together to respond to the theme:

SCAR – cutting through the land

It is a rare opportunity in Cumbria to find an ‘open call’ commission where artists can develop their own creative practice rather than work to a tight brief, and the resulting work is exciting and innovative, taking inspiration which differs wildly from images taken from space to Ice Age fish species.

Some of the artists came together to cocreate the theme, thinking of natural scars in rock or carved by rivers and the scars humans have made across or even below the land like roads, railways and mines. Artists also thought more broadly about the damage we do to the land with litter, erosion and climate control. Artist perspectives vary enormously from images from outer space to human emotion and memory, looking at scars across time from glacial remains to the future of nuclear waste.

The commissioned artists are:

Bridget Kennedy

Bridget Kennedy lives in Northumberland and has been making work in West Cumbria for the past eight years. Bridget is interested in alternative ways of relating to vitrified nuclear waste, considering the wider issue of its long term disposal by engaging with the mining heritage of West Cumbria. She has developed a new method of drawing for this exhibition using dowsing to guide the mark making process, which she explored with workshop participants in October 2025.

Abbie Fowler

Abbie Fowler, a recent graduate from Manchester School of Art, has created a large free range sculpture outside via mapping using lines in the land and found materials. This will remain and will decay as nature flows, in collaboration with the land that surrounds Florence.

Clare Parker

Clare Parker from Low Mill Studio, Egremont, has created Up and Down, a large scale mixed media wall hanging depicting the sublime ‘scars’ on the earth as seen from space looking down. This was inspired by the Euro Space Agency data as part of Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission. The contrasting smaller piece translated onto a found object examines detail from below ground, looking up.

Bob Dixon

Bob Dixon is from West Cumbria. His series of watercolours RAW reflects the emotions of scarred landscapes expressed as human emotion, pairing people with scarred places - from the tiny seed that is left scarred on separation from its pod to the larger universal scale with supernovas and subsequent black holes.

Jessica Emsley

Jessica Emsley, a walking artist from Kendal has recorded through cumulative drawing her experience of four walks in Cumbria in which the human and non human are deeply interwoven – Florence to Ullcoats to Beckermet mines; the Grasmere Coffin Route; Keswick to Threlkeld railway line; the springs of the River Kent to Kendal.

Morgan Murray Arts

Helen Morgan & Janice Murray

Helen Morgan and Janice Murray work collaboratively in West Cumbria. They have very different ways of working; Helen’s mixed media abstract expressionist paintings are inspired by the local landscape, memory and inner emotion whereas Janice employs traditional craft and textile techniques to create quirky and engaging pieces. In this work they have responded to the commission by focusing on the relationship between humans and landscape within the Lake District UNESCO world heritage site.

Sally Ann Staunton

Sally Ann is a performer and spoken word artist from Barrow and she engages local people to help co-create her work by recording their words. Her piece includes responses from members of two Egremont community groups to the theme of SCAR.

Sophie Bass

Sophie Bass is an artist from Cleator Moor and her artwork responds to her immediate surroundings. She will use litter collected on her local cycle path to create a sculpture of the mythical ‘beast of Cumbria’.

Nanette Madan

Nanette Madan from Gosforth (and a resident artist at Florence Arts Centre) will take inspiration from Wasdale, the site of the deepest lake and highest fell in England. Her installation, made from household waste, highlights the impacts of climate change, specifically on Arctic Char and purple saxifrage. Declines in native fauna and flora form an invisible scar on our landscape as other more competitive species invade, filling the gaps in a seamless takeover.

Janellen Redington

Janellen Redington has created a layered, mixed media artwork based on an OS map and a long form poem, where scars reveal transformation and change:

“A scar is more than a mark. It is memory. It is proof. It is change. Like flesh split and healed, the land too bears witness.”