Falmouth Art Gallery has added a series of significant artworks to its public collection over the past year, strengthening its holdings of contemporary and historic pieces and expanding the range of artists represented. The acquisitions – supported by private donors and external funding – include films, prints, paintings and drawings by both emerging and established names.
Georgia Gendall (Image: Falmouth Art Gallery)
One of the most high-profile additions is The Worm Forgives the Plough by Cornwall-based artist Georgia Gendall, a short film commissioned for the gallery’s 2024 exhibition ‘Ammeth’. Featuring the St Keverne Brass Band performing a score by Seamus Carey, the film is joined by an oil pastel drawing and a suite of risograph prints celebrating Gendall’s Worm Charming championship, founded in 2022.
Another major acquisition is Playing Place, a four-plate photopolymer etching by local artist Ben Sanderson, created with master printmaker Simon Marsh. The work, which debuted at the University of Warwick’s Mead Gallery, is the first of Sanderson’s pieces to enter the gallery’s extensive print collection.
To mark the centenary of ceramic artist and printmaker Eric James Mellon, the gallery has also received Mermaid of Zennor, a woodcut print gifted by the artist’s daughter and son-in-law. Depicting intertwined figures and the Porthleven clocktower, the piece will appear in Collections Corner – the gallery’s rotating monthly focus – this November.
An oil painting by Maurice Sumray, titled The Unquiet Offering, has also joined the collection nearly 30 years after the gallery staged a retrospective of his work. The painting, showing a Jewish elder and a younger male figure, is currently on display in the gallery’s one-room Collections Display until July 4.
Maurice Sumray (Image: Falmouth Art Gallery)
The gallery has received its first public-collection work by Caeria Strong: Horse, Cow and Sheep Skulls (1991), an oil painting gifted by the artist’s daughter Rebecca Tabram. The piece will feature in the second rotation of the Collections Display from 8 July to 31 December.
Completing the acquisitions is Shop on the Quay (1889), a watercolour by Mary Winifred Freeman depicting a bustling grocer’s shop. The work was exhibited at the Institute of Painters in Watercolours in 1889 and was purchased with support from The Arts Society Falmouth.
Jacob Moss, collections manager at Falmouth Art Gallery, said the new additions reflect the breadth of the town’s artistic heritage and its contemporary creativity. “These acquisitions represent not just a broadening of our collection, but a commitment to showcasing diverse narratives and creative practices,” he said.