REVIEW: Poppy Jones / Frozen Sun
By Alison Norwood, volunteer arts reviewer
If ever an opportunity for quiet contemplation was needed it is now, and this evocative new exhibition at Towner Eastbourne provides it.
The ground-floor gallery has become a place of refuge, with white walls displaying the small paintings of Poppy Jones in her distinctive style, for her first institutional solo exhibition.
These subtle works are at once of ordinary subjects and yet about everything, about living, often quietly subdued.
Jones produces these works on repurposed textiles, which gives the images an inherently softer sensation. The close-up of Last September (2026) makes the jacket so real looking you can almost feel it.
Maybe because winter is ending, or maybe because tulips with their long stems can only hold themselves upright if fresh and watered, A Shining (2025) caught my attention (main image). It shows tulips against a yellow background of sunlight coming through a window, like the late afternoon at this time of year. Here, as in other tulip images, some stems are proudly aloft, others peeling downwards. It is the kind of view one sees in many homes, yet is here captured as a piece of art.
Similarly, the tiny first painting when entering the gallery is Tulip (Chez Mondrian) (2026), where a sinuously reverse S-shaped single red tulip almost slithers out of the frame from its vase.
Like all the works here it is in a shiny aluminium frame, providing a pleasing contrast with the gentleness of the image inside. This contrast works across the various media used in painting, photography, and printed onto suede, silk, or cotton for all the pieces.
Particularly serene is the depiction of a tangerine, an egg, a glass of water and a lemon, on a tablecloth which seems initially like a traditional still life and yet isn’t somehow. Quartet (2024) goes beyond its everyday subject in its texture and depth, and several visitors paused by it.
All of these contemporary still lifes generate pause for thought. For instance, in Slow Fall (2023) with the lamp shining onto an empty surface – I wondered what it should be illuminating; what’s missing? We are told that these images invite us to contemplate memory, life, death, and the passage of time. Certainly Last Days (2023) made me feel the end of something even before I’d seen its title, with the desiccating petals seeming, to me, like a metaphor for weeping.
During the speeches at the preview evening, Joe Hill, in his last few hours as director of Towner, spoke of his pleasure in Jones exhibiting here, as an artist who has chosen to live and work in Eastbourne.
The curation of this exhibition is a mix of new works with some from other collections. It is the third of the Emerging Artists Fund shows, with a comparatively short run, and is highly recommended. Not just for the technical cleverness of the paintings, complete with printmakers’ shadows and the occasional intentional fingerprint, rather for the sense of escape the works provide, and a reason to spend half an hour away from the bustle of the world and to lose yourself in them.
:: Frozen Sun runs from 28 March until 31 May 2026 in Gallery 1 at Towner and is free to attend
:: Alison Norwood is managing director of Norwood Editorial Services; she was previously an academic publisher. She has also worked in print and design, and writes novels in her spare time. Alison has always studied art history and is a volunteer arts reviewer for Eastbourne Reporter
