Ben Sanderson

Ben Sanderson holds a BFA from University College Falmouth, and in 2017 took part in Syllabus III, a roaming study programme partnered with Wysing Arts Centre, Studio Voltaire, Eastside Projects, Iniva, New Contemporaries, S1 Artspace, and Spike Island.

Selected exhibitions include: Green at an Angle, Kestle Barton, Cornwall (2021); Glade, Potager Garden, Cornwall (2020); Chicken Nuggets, Pool School Gallery, Cornwall (2019); Where it is, there it is, Auction House, Cornwall (2018); Can we Still Be Friends?, Guest Projects, London (2018); These Fingers Read Sideways, Monomatic, Edinburgh (2018); What Is This Place?, Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall (2017); Smile Orange, Cubitt Gallery, London (2015); Testing Tropes, Kestle Barton, Cornwall (2015).

Sanderson has had a studio at CAST (Helston) since 2013 and has been closely involved with the development of the organisation from the start, as well as contributing to CAST’s ongoing programme of public screenings and events.

In the past few years he has worked with Pool School Gallery, CAST-Off and many other independent projects, including work with dementia patients and with young people. He has been commissioned to create a new work for Hospital Rooms that will be completed in 2021, where he will be looking into the emotional and neurological effects of plants.

In February 2019 – February 2021 Ben had a residency at Trebah Gardens on the Helford River. During his time at Trebah, he organised a series of garden walks with specialists (an ethnobotanical researcher, gardeners, a psychiatrist, a herbalist, artists, poets, and friends) and they discussed in depth the space between people and plants. These conversations went on to inform his work in the studio and have left him still questioning what happens at the garden’s edge.

These interests evolved through his working process where images and forms come and go, and systems are interrupted. The works develop slowly, attuned to the seasons, embracing cyclical processes of growth and decay. Ben's work in painting, drawing and textiles, often returning to existing pieces and transforming them: monotypes on paper are developed and echoed in printed elements that appear on canvas; canvas is sewn and patched back together or mulched to become rag paper, which in turn becomes a ground for new painting.