Artist in Focus
- Artist in Focus
- Peter Colombus 9 July – 21 September 2025
- Ashley Howard 18 July – 21 September 2025
- Peta Jacobs 11 April – 8 June 2025
Artist in Focus
Newlands House Gallery’s Artist in Focus at the shop and café area highlights contemporary artists with exclusive works and special displays. Discover unique artworks, books, and limited editions that celebrate today’s leading creatives. Immerse yourself in art in a relaxed setting, where culture and conversation intertwine.
Dr Loucia Manopoulou
With over 25 years of experience in curatorial research and cultural strategy across craft, design, and contemporary art, Loucia has worked with commercial galleries, museums, and cultural projects, including the Athens 2004 Olympic Games. She has also shared her expertise at national and international conferences on curatorial practices.
Peter Colombus 9 July – 21 September 2025

Peter Colombus – Biomimetics: Automotive Design Inspired by Nature
To celebrate the start of the Goodwood Festival of Speed 2025, we’re proud to introduce our new Maker in Focus: Peter Colombus. An acclaimed automotive designer and visualisation artist, Peter presents a striking collection of prints and 3D-printed objects.
The exhibition explores how nature-inspired design, combined with advanced digital tools, can shape the future of automotive design. Bringing together technology and natural principles, the exhibition highlights a new direction in design thinking, where innovation emerges from the logic of nature itself.

The Italian (2025)
1955 Ferrari 750 Monza inspired livery
design for Ferrari Daytona SP3
Archival Digital CType Print, on 5mm
Foamboard Mount, tray framed
61x91cm

M1C (2025)
1967 746 McLaren M1C sport livery
design for McLaren Elva
Archival Digital CType Print, on 5mm
Foamboard Mount, tray framed
61x91cm
Ashley Howard 18 July – 21 September 2025

Ashley Howard – Interplay
Ashley Howard is a celebrated British potter whose practice bridges the expressive potential of the wheel-thrown vessel with a deep exploration of ritual, material, and transformation.
Grounded in the traditions of East Asian ceramics and shaped by extensive experience in Japan and China, Howard’s work challenges conventional notions of permanence. Drawing on longstanding interests in spirituality, space, and the poetics of material, his practice speaks to the shifting relationships between people, place, and object.
Interplay brings together new and recent works that push the limits of ceramic possibility, where glaze becomes glue, the wheel becomes a tool of expressive force, and the vessel takes on ceremonial resonance. Each piece is approached not as a static object, but as part of an evolving process, often fired multiple times, fused with incompatible clays, and reworked until form and surface reach a dynamic equilibrium.
Composer John Cage’s concept of a “world of events as opposed to objects” resonates strongly with Howard’s understanding of his work as an ongoing process rather than a finished piece.
His deep connections with Japan and China reinforce this perspective, suggesting that rather than embodying permanence, ceramic objects exist in a constant state of flux. Though ceramics are often considered durable, they too are subject to transformation and change.
Described by critic David Whiting as “an assured but rigorous explorer,” Howard redefines the wheel-thrown form as a site of experimentation and reflection. Howards’ work is held in both public and private collections and has been exhibited internationally, from London, Winchester, and St Ives to Tokyo and Beijing.

CHALICE, mixed clays Thrown and altered clays with various glazes and enamels, £3,200

PARADIGM, porcelain
Thrown and altered porcelain with enamel, £680
Past Exhibitions…
Peta Jacobs 11 April – 8 June 2025
Peta‘s playful and illusory mixed-media artworks offer visual and visceral experiences of difficult quantum questions raised by an exploration of the nature of light including entwined dualities, superposition, entanglements, interference patterns, indeterminate boundaries and the intrinsic interconnectedness of all things.
In science, the fundamental question of whether light is a particle or a wave, or indeed both, has perplexed physicists for centuries. The two-slit experiments to solve this have raised more even questions and revealed that both light and matter at the subatomic realm are bizarre and paradoxical. These experiments demonstrated the fundamentally dual nature of light, that it is both a particle and a wave. For Jacobs, particle/wave duality is a recurring motif explored in many different ways.
Quantum discoveries transcend the phenomenal world and raise philosophical considerations about the very nature of reality itself, uncovering notions of interconnectedness, wholeness, and infinity. For instance, the inseparability of the observer and the observed has led some physicists to conclude that the act of observation creates reality. In response, Jacobs’ artworks invite active engagement, rewarding the viewer’s bodily movement with playful views of shifting shapes, colours, and experiences of superpositions of dual opposites. Her works challenge fixed perspectives, encouraging the exploration of possibilities that exist beyond binary thinking.
Jacobs draws inspiration by physicist, David Bohm, whose theories of implicate and explicate orders and the holomovement move beyond dualistic thinking and separation of mind and matter to reveal underlying universal interconnectedness, wholeness and infinity.
Utilising optical materials commonly found in scientific laboratories, such as half-silvered mirrors, prisms, dichroic beam-splitters, and diffraction gratings, Jacobs delves into profound quantum concepts. These materials, pivotal to the two-slit experiment, unveil light’s enigmatic properties. When integrated into her artworks, these materials present multiple visual experiences simultaneously. As viewers traverse the space, elements undergo colour and shape transformations, appearing and vanishing in unexpected ways.
Through “Beyond Duality and Other Quantum Questions,” Jacobs invites viewers to embrace the paradoxes of quantum physics and transcend their perceptual boundaries. By doing so, she paves the way for novel thought processes and visual perceptions.
Peta Jacobs
Dr. Peta Jacobs is a textile mixed media artist, based in Bristol. Her PhD and ongoing research are inspired by the question posed by László Moholy-Nagy in Light Vision (1917): “Are space, time, and material one with Light?”
Jacobs work explores the paradox of immaterial substance, drawing from both quantum physics and Eastern mystical experience. Through her practice, she challenges certainty and perception, presenting shifting views that evolve with the viewer’s perspective.