3 July - 31 August 2025
OPENING TIMES
Walkway, Foyer-bar & Orchard Room: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday & Friday 8:30am - 4:00pm | Wednesday - CLOSED | Saturday 9:00am - 3:00pm | Sunday 10:00am - 3:00pm
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Harry Cory Wright is a leading landscape artist working in photography, drawing, painting and relief. For the Granary, he has created a site-specific exhibition responding to our local chalk stream habitat, one of the rarest and richest ecosystems on the planet.
600 Pieces of Landscape: Chalk Stream is a site-wide exhibition formed from 600 small hand-painted wooden panels, all representing some aspect of the Granary's chalk stream landscape through colour, shape, texture or via superimposed photographs. By reducing a real landscape to its most basic components, Harry Cory Wright has created a 'play kit' of building blocks with which to construct imaginary abstract landscapes. Over three distinct areas in the Granary, these 600 unique units are positioned in different linear and layered formations, the patterns and rhythms suggesting horizons or composite views. Some of these arrangements are curated by the artist, and some by the visitor.
A building within a building: sound within sound
Closest to the chalk stream habitat, visitors will find a full size shed installed in the Orchard Room. Hundreds of painted panels are laid out randomly on shelves, and visitors are encouraged to playfully arrange these units on boards to create their own abstract response to the landscape. A specially commissioned sound installation by composer and field recordist Rob Godman will play continually in the Orchard Room. 'Sound within Sound' is made up of two ecosystems: the familiar sounds of the chalk stream habitat (birds, wildlife) are heard on entry to the room, and the unfamiliar underwater acoustic of the chalk stream itself, generated by two hydrophones placed at the bottom of our stream, can be heard inside the shed.
Harry Cory Wright describes the shed installation visitor experience:
'As you choose and arrange the pieces in the shed, you might consider aspects of the stream that you have not seen or thought of before. It might be as you see it now in summer with all the varying visual aspects of water life in the early morning, the heat of midday or at night. You might choose pieces that made you think about life underwater, imagining the creatures and plants that thrive in the extraordinary habitat. You might choose pieces that help you imagine what it might have been like to be here a hundred or a thousand years ago. You might consider what it could be like here in the future. This installation provides an opportunity for a ‘piecing together’ of colours and images, finding your own patterns and clues that suggest a very personal experience of being in landscape'.
Artist biography
Born in 1963, Harry lives and works in Norfolk. He has exhibited extensively and continually throughout the UK for over 30 years. He was been commissioned by some of the most recognisable places and brands including Blenheim Palace, Gylndebourne, Women's Olympic Team, Chanel, Windsor Castle and the Frida Kahlo Museum. His prizewinning images have been featured in 17 books and countless times in Harpers Bazaar, Town and Country, The Times, The Guardian, The Observer, Vogue, World of Interiors and Boat International. His 2017 shot of artist Maggi Hambling was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery as part of the Taylor Wessing portrait prize. Harry's work was included in Landmark: The Fields of Photography at Somerset House, London (2013) curated by William A. Ewing. Solo exhibitions include Hey Charlie, Eleven (2013), Place in Mind, Eleven (2011), and Journey Through the British Isles (2007).
The estuary of Burnham Overy-Staithe is particularly close to Harry's heart and features in his 2024 Vision of an Estuary, which explores the visual language of being in a landscape through four albums of work, incorporating photography, drawing, painting and reliefs. His large format photographs reveal in great detail the immediate experience of being part of the camera's view. His applied work involves inky pen marks, wide brush gestures and collage of coloured paper and wood, identifying singular visual elements that collectively rekindle a deep, personal and often mysterious love affair with the British landscape.
