The Mother Lode is a series of solo exhibitions by artists who are also mothers, reframing motherhood as a powerful creative source rather than a diversion from artistic practice. Through painting, sculpture, and installation, the project explores how care, labour, transformation, and contradiction shape both maternal identity and artistic process. Each exhibition stands alone while contributing to a growing collective of maternal voices. Part 1: Jennifer Pitchers explores motherhood, fantasy, and the subconscious through painting, marking a powerful, re-emergent return to creative practice.

Exhibitions are open 10am–4pm, Monday–Friday, and by appointment on Saturdays.

“A Love Letter to East Suffolk” – Photography Talk

Join photographer Richard Allenby-Pratt for an evening exploring rural life, landscape, and community through his long-running work with The Suffolk Project.

📍 The Art Station, The Old Bank, 24 High Street, Saxmundham
🎟 Free entry

Richard has spent the last eight years documenting Suffolk’s rural communities. This talk celebrates what he has seen and learned so far and introduces a new oral histories initiative recording the impact of change along the Suffolk coast.

Presented in collaboration with The Long Shop Museum and kindly sponsored by East Suffolk councillors.

Kristina Tonev works across durational performance, installation, sculpture, and painting, exploring themes of time, mortality, and care. Her evolving woven straw vertebrae—shaped by their environment—reflect labour, endurance, and maternal attentiveness. Through slow, deliberate making and performance, Tonev examines vulnerability, maintenance, and survival, positioning motherhood as a continual process of transformation.

Anna Ilsley’s myth-inspired paintings confront motherhood, fertility and the politics of the female body head-on. Her vivid, fleshy figures push against the limits of the canvas, asserting presence, desire and power. Drawing on ancient myth and contemporary experience, Ilsley’s work interrogates how women’s bodies are controlled, revered and feared. Within The Motherlode, her paintings reclaim maternal and fertile bodies as sites of agency and excess, challenging historical and cultural narratives that seek to contain them.