ROSA Botanical Art Fair: Newlands House Gallery ‘Craft Banquet’ 

1- 4 May 2026
West Dean College

We are honoured to be part of this year’s ROSA Botanical Art Fair

ROSA Botanical Art Fair is a new art fair set in the grounds of West Dean Estate in West Sussex  that will take visitors on an artistic voyage through the botanical world. The Fair comprises a tented fair with stands selling Modern and Contemporary botanical art, a series of curated exhibitions in the historic West Dean Estate House, a sculpture garden and a programme of events. The award-winning West Dean gardens in full spring bloom and the very latest in floral art and horticultural creativity will create an unmissable event.

Featured will be rare pieces by pioneering 20th-century artists, including Paul Nash, Prunella Clough and Tadek Beutlich, together with bold contemporary works encompassing digital, sculpture, painting, drawing, textiles and jewellery, reveal how artists explore a broad botanical spectrum to reimagine our relationship with the natural world.

CRAFT BANQUET

Curated by Dr Loucia Manopolou, Director, Newlands House Gallery and mixed media artist Kas Williams MA. 

The Old Dining Room in West Dean House is a place of encounter and exchange through installations and artworks celebrating the natural world. Focal points are the historic banqueting table where crafted objects invite close looking with works inspired by flowers and material processes that trace connections between making, nature, and the rhythms of the seasons.

The installation brings together a range of craft practices, including ceramics, textiles, glass, and print in celebration of a space where beauty, function, and meaning intertwine blurring the boundaries between use, display and exhibition.

Price: £13.75 + booking Fee
Location: West Dean House, West Dean College, Chichester, West Sussex, UK

Click here to learn more.

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FEATURED ARTISTS

Ashley Howard

Ashley Howard is a potter and part-time Lecturer in ceramics at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham. He studied for his Masters degree at the Royal College of Art. He has published a number of articles on technical and aesthetic issues. He has exhibited, demonstrated and lectured all over the world, spending considerable time in Japan and China. His achievements on the national and international stages underpin his membership of the International Academy for Ceramics http://www.aic-iac.org/. Howard has work in public and private collections and has featured in a number of publications. 

Web: www.ashleyhoward.co.uk   Instagram: @ashleyhowardceramics

Annette Mills

Annette Mills work focuses on concepts related to transitional spaces. Change and impermanence are inherent in the physical processes involved in the making, and they guide and influence her decision-making. The early stages of making may initially appear chaotic. However, by harnessing the dynamic and flexible qualities of the materials, potential forms begin to emerge, and a structure gradually takes shape. Her work explores how this process can be seen as a journey through transitional spaces and whether the initial feelings of excitement and energy can be preserved within the final, refined piece.  

Web: www.annettemills.com  Instagram: @_annette.mills

Alison Baxter

Alison Baxter works with thread, fabric and metal creating site specific work, small scale vessels and containers, and jewellery. She uses bobbin lace and self-generated techniques with thread, various techniques with fine metal sheet to explore the fragility of materials and processes to express fragments of experiential memories. Work shown at the Botanical Art Fair is the start of a long term project celebrating the individual character of trees, particularly those that are solitary. The intimate scale of her work asks the viewer to pause, lean in and look. To be still and experience the moment and the object in total.

Web: www.alisonbaxter.org.uk  Instagram: @alisonbaxterartjewellery

Cara Wassenberg

Cara Wassenberg’s work comes from two passions, a love of process and of organic form. She creates sculpture in copper and steel  often by combining multiple craft processes such as forging, welding and patination. Her ideas come from the landscapes she walks through, the water she swims in and the forms she finds. Within her work and it’s forms are the echoes of intriguing points of encounter such as where sea meets shore. 

Web: www.carawassenberg.com   Instagram: @carawassenberg.sculpture

Corinne Young

Corinne Young creates botanical three dimensional embroidered artworks inspired by the flowers she studies in her garden, antique botanical books, flower myths and meanings and the artefacts to be found in historic houses, particularly 17th century stumpwork. She hand makes linen paper using linen fibres and a silk paper making method to create a robust material with a natural stiffness to make her sculptures. Her minute studies in detail are future heirloom pieces, delicate in feel, that reflect the complexity and fragility of their subject matter.

Web: www.corinneyoungtextiles.co.uk  Instagram: @corinneyoungstudio 

Ella Merriman

Ella Merriman is a London-based artist and designer working with the endangered craft of rush basketry. Her work explores the disconnection between humans and nature, drawing on her fascination with plant-human relationships. She combines rush with found objects from London streets, seeking harmony between urban and rural life. Rooted in slow, tactile processes, her practice is guided by intuition and her materials.

She describes her work as ‘love letters to nature’. believing that her practice reunites her with the land and she finds a deep sense of belonging and grounding within her making process.

Web: www.ellamerriman.com    Instagram: @studiomerriman

Fleur Grenier

Fleur Grenier uses traditional pewter smithing skills to create fluid sculptural forms as well as contemporary pewter homeware. She also works with clients to make private bespoke pewter commissions, individual and sculptural in style. Continuously seeking new ways of working she has discovered new ways to manipulate her materials incorporating other elements such as glass and concrete that have challenged her to learn new skills and often opens the door to new developments in her work.

Web: www.fleurgrenier.co.uk    Instagram: @fleurgreniersculpture

Helen Dyne

Helen Dyne is a self-taught glass artist who has been working with glass for 25 years.  Her inspiration comes from the beauty of nature, inspired by many country walks. She incorporates in some of her pieces found objects that she collects on many of these walks. She uses a mixture of techniques from fusing, flamework and the traditional lost wax technique.  She strives to capture a delicate feel to many of her pieces pushing boundaries all the time, to create mesmerising natural displays.

Instagram: @helen_dyne_

Kas Williams

Kas Williams creates highly engaging and contemporary three dimensional artworks with a strong sense of texture, rhythm and gesture. Through painting she creates a visual library of marks, images and gestures that translates across different mediums and materials using a fusion of processes and techniques. Patterns, textures, marks that leave their trace and responses to music are ideas that float and percolate over time, shifting and settling until they form a rhythm that takes shape into a piece of work. This visual vocabulary with its recurring themes of layered colour shade and pattern has become a signature of her work. 

Web: www.kaswilliams.com Instagram: @kaswilliams

Mona Craven

Mona Craven is a textile fine artist, researcher and educator. Her praxis intersects a ‘south’ perspective and material culture research with creative methods to think about the relationality between things. Mona works in an interdisciplinary manner with paper, light, and textile media to create installations, drawings, and prints. Her work has been exhibited independently and in national and international group shows since 2019. 

A printmaker’s toolbox and the materiality of things are central to her thinking process.

Web: www.monacraven.co.uk   Instagram: @msmonacr

Rachel Grimes – The Mirror & The Veil  

Rachel Grimes is a floral artist, family woman and classically trained cellist. From her creative workshop-studio in Uckfield she conjures spectacular mixed media floral displays for events throughout the UK and Europe. She describes her work as a gathering of people, products, mechanics, and then… letting go ! Her loose approach to making is both spontaneous and experimental, allowing the process to suggest combinations of materials and ideas and always looking for that sweet spot when all the planning pays off and the piece comes together. “Responding in real time is where the performer in me kicks in – improvisation at its best!”

Web: www.themirrorandtheveil.co.uk  Instagram: @themirrorandtheveil