Homecoming show for artist

ARTIST Bryony Rose has come home to exhibit at the Cample Line gallery in Thornhill this summer.

‘Love Bites’ is an exhibition of new work in ceramic by Bryony, who was raised in rural Dumfries and Galloway.

It opened last weekend and runs until Sunday 31 August.

The show extends her exploration of glazed ceramic sculptural relief and builds upon two recent solo shows at Quench Gallery in Margate in 2024, and at Kiosk in Glasgow in 2023.

In ten new works made for Love Bites, the range of her subjects has been expanded to include horseflies, erupting insect bites, dandelion seed heads and fields of sheep viewed through car windows.

She also tells semi-autobiographical stories of longing and restlessness that foreground the at times abrasive, repetitive and banal aspects of adolescent rural experience.

In particular, Love Bites draws upon the last summer she spent in Dumfriesshire before moving to Glasgow aged 17, framed by memories of ‘an all-consuming first love and the draining feeling of ‘being at home and with my family at that time’.

She recalled: “The clegs were particularly intense that summer, biting my mole-scattered skin.” In this sense, the exhibition’s title alludes to both the horsefly’s bite and the hickey.

Rose trained in painting and printmaking at The Glasgow School of Art, then moved to Margate in 2019 where she was an associate artist at Open School East. Over the last seven years, she has focused her practice around the development of ceramic sculptural reliefs and an exploration of narrative that has centred on memories of her rural Scottish upbringing.

She is interested in the relationship between lived experience and memory, using remembered sensations and images as a starting point to complicate narrative and explore emotional response.

“I am drawn to the inherent eeriness and nostalgia that can be pulled out of these memories - on a personal and cultural level,” she said. A new essay by Laura Plant will accompany the exhibition.

Above: Bryony Rose, Sucker 1, 2025, (detail), hand-made glazed ceramic tiles