Title: A Confluence of Elements
Venue: Rye Gallery, East Sussex
Date: 9th May – 21th June 2026
Lossenham Project artists: Russell Burden and Melvyn Evans
(with a film by Kit Warren and 5″x4″ photographs by Terry Hulf)
Curatorial walk: Led by Russell Burden and Andrew Richardson
Private View: 9th May 2026. Art, Music, Film & History from the Lossenham Landscape: Explores the landscape of Lossenham in the Kentish countryside, bringing together the work of Artist in Residence Russell Burden, visiting artist Melvyn Evans and photographer Terry Hulf. Drawing directly from the site’s materials and ancient history, the exhibition reflects a shared response to place, process, and collaboration.
Catalogue Introduction: A Confluence of Elements alludes to the materiality and movements of place. The exhibition centres on a specific location in the Kentish countryside: a small hamlet in the parish of Newenden named Lossenham. Lossenham sits on a gently descending peninsula of undulating fields and ponds, creating a quiet landscape bounded on two sides by the River Rother to the south and the Hexden Channel to the north, the two waters converging further east among the drained peaty soils of the Rother Levels. The thin rural skin of the higher ground is underpinned by a stratified sequence of alluvial clays and silts laid down over 130 million years ago in the sub-tropical lagoons and floodplains of the Valanginian age. Walking east toward the landlocked Isle of Oxney, the soft slope of the terrain quickly falls away to spongy reedbeds and a barely visible maze of ditches and fields, systems still apparent on early tithe maps. Lossenham is a place of historic significance, containing a long-lost Carmelite priory and the enigmatic Castle Toll, the remains of an ancient earthwork of uncertain origin. Around the medieval remains, far earlier artefacts have been retrieved.

The artistic story at Lossenham began in late 2020 when Russell Burden was invited to walk through the wetland landscape with Andrew Richardson who had just been asked to lead an emerging archaeological project on the site. Through a series of serendipitous events, Russell found himself appointed as ‘Artist in Residence’ for the project, an engagement that has spanned five years. However, this is more than the confluence of material elements and historic landscape; the exhibition also represents a convergence of minds—a partnership between Russell Burden and Melvyn Evans that intertwines imagination with Lossenham’s vernacular materiality. In November 2022, Russell visited Melvyn Evans’ studio, and their conversation quickly illuminated shared sensibilities, marking the beginning of a lasting friendship. By late 2024, Melvyn, who had by then become acquainted with Lossenham, was invited for a year-long residency on the landscape, leading to a natural collaboration.

Russell’s foraged mineral pigments were worked into paints and inks by Melvyn and they sourced wood which Melvyn used to fashion a violin bow, and play tonal passages that were in turn layered into a musical piece composed by Russell. Their combined work for A Confluence of Elements features a subtly shared visual language that alludes to both Carmelite and earlier human presence in the Lossenham landscape.

Russell’s work at Lossenham has explored a variety of mediums, starting with photography and writing, and progressing to field recordings, musical compositions, ceramics, and cameraless image-making. The film ‘Uncertain Boundaries’, created with Kit Warren during his residency, encompasses many of these aspects. However, the primary focus of his work shown at Rye Gallery delves into his process of foraging and isolating mineral colours from the landscape, alongside rare fossil-bearing stones gathered from Lossenham’s fields and honed into votive pieces; site-specific responses that utilise the very materials of the landscape.

“I have been exploring the materiality and the sense of place in the Lossenham landscape. For me, it has been a place of hidden diversity, hidden in the sense that the simplicity of the environment that one initially encounters belies the profusion of detail that unfolds through closer observation. I could cite the wide range of pigment colours to be discovered in the clays, minerals, and iron oxides, the unexpected tapestry of sub-surface sounds within the ponds, and Lossenham can be such a visceral and intimate retreat, a place of seclusion and quietude that affords both time and space to contemplate one’s inner landscape and, over time, a sense of emptying out has naturally happened.”

The Lossenham minerals and clays, prospected and worked into an array of coloured pigments by Russell, have afforded Melvyn a vocabulary unique to the land. Colours ground fine, mixed with oil to produce paints and inks, the soul of place applied to canvas and board. Melvyn transmutes forms contained within his paintings and develops them into sculptural forms. The sculptures are carved from a natural resin plaster containing foraged Lossenham pigments, or from found wood on the landscape.

“The experience of working at Lossenham has been wonderful, the freedom to explore layers of geology and history, to handle foraged minerals and clays, and the opportunity to wander along new creative paths. The peace of the Lossenham landscape allows for inner contemplation; sensations within can take precedence over a figurative portrayal of nature. The notion arises that an accumulated history has an energy, a stored charge within the deposits of soil, sands, clays, and iron; part of the materiality of each pigment foraged from the ground is different, and therefore each pigment influences and guides the form of the resulting painting.”

Melvyn’s painting and sculptural motifs and forms are inspired by the presence of the Carmelite Priory at Lossenham, the land as a meditative and contemplative place, the ancient concept of votive pools as sites of offering or portals to another realm.

Towards the end of 2025, Terry Hulf, a long-standing friend of the late Fay Godwin, was invited to capture large-format photographs of Lossenham.  Some of his winter and early spring images from many early morning visits have been included in the exhibition; his strict, self-imposed rules of engagement offer a wonderfully raw and unfiltered representation of place as his eye finds it.

Title: Vessel of affordances
Artist: Russell Burden
Date: 2025/26
Media: Wood, plaster, hematite gesso, gold leaf, glass, Lossenham mineral pigments
Image location: Lossenham reed beds
Dimensions: 31mm x 850mm x 210mm

‘Sitting on an oak plinth of acanthus, egg, and dart motifs is an ark of minerals. This could be the planet Earth traversing the cosmos, or it may represent a body’s minerals as they pass through its life, or perhaps the soul’s journey, or the Carmelite journey from Mount Carmel to England, and the river to Lossenham where they established a priory in the 13th century – however one wishes to imagine this vessel. The cargo, a range of pigment colours foraged from the Lossenham landscape, a landscape that can hold its secrets close. Worked by pestle and mortar, muller and plate, the finer the mineral is ground, the richer the colour becomes.’

Title: Sun Arc I, due south
Artist: Russell Burden
Date: September 2024
Media: Pinhole exposure
Location: Lossenham
Dimensions: t.b.c

‘A single day’s sun-track captured in a homemade pinhole camera strapped to a tree at Lossenham. It is easy to forget that the east-west track of the sun is actually the Earth rotating in the opposite direction, and the peak of the track is determined by the Earth’s orbit around the Sun coupled with the Earth’s tilt on its axis. Lossenham’s approximate latitude of 51° north spins at about 770 mph, whilst orbiting the Sun (by one set of calculations) at 66,615 mph, not to mention our solar system careering through our Milky Way galaxy at 492,540 mph. Adding the motions of our galaxy, its local cluster, nested superclusters and beyond, this perceptually intangible sense of interstellar travel quickly escapes all comprehension.’

Title: Unknowing
Artist: Russell Burden
Date: 2021
Media: Cotton giclee print
Location: Lossenham lake
Dimensions: 100mm x 100mm (image)

‘Created at the start of the Lossenham residency, ‘Dark Night’ was inspired by the absence of artistic clarity when encountering the rural landscape, steeped in a hidden Carmelite history yet seemingly lacking in much of the artist’s usual subject matter. The image encapsulates the artist’s feelings and his conviction that, given time, creative inspiration would unfold.’

Title: Mollusk
Artist: Russell Burden
Date: 2026
Media: Sculpture: sideritic limestone matrix. Plinth: salvaged Georgian ceramic plinth, limestone matrix pigment
Dimensions: 330mm – 210mm – 60mm (mollusk without plinth)

‘Over 134 million years ago, colonies of tiny shells formed in Wealden lagoons and the braided riverbeds of the sub-tropical Valanginian age. Now embedded in iron-rich calcitic stone, the fossils of those bivalves may still be discovered as rough-surfaced rocks in the fields and pools of Lossenham. This sculpture’s monolithic form honours the ancient curves of the disarticulated bivalves seen within the stone’s matrix, reminding us that the materials in our sedimentary landscapes were once components of entirely different ecosystems and, by working the stone with chisels and files, the rocks’ minerals are returned to the silt and soil to be recycled in a myriad of ways.’

Title: Forms of Clearance
Artist: Russell Burden
Date: 2025/26
Media: Sideritic limestone matrix, Lossenham hematite, gold leaf
Dimensions: 240mm x 145mm x 27mm (largest axe form)

‘In this series, the axe form is understood to be one of the oldest and longest-used man-shaped objects. It may be seen equally as creative or destructive: a tool to deforest the world, or a tool to shape a work of art. The axe has long been used as a votive object, a symbol of polarity, of both light and darkness. It appears as a mythic symbol in many cultures: the Keraunos, thunder weapon of Zeus, the double-edged Labrys of the Minoans, or the Tibetan Dorje… all metaphysical tools that may be used to shape the spiritual self, or shape the ego. The forms in this series possess a concave hollow, a portal to the vitality of the stone itself and loci of votive intention.’

Title: Vessel Figures
Artist: Russell Burden
Date: 2026
Media: Silica bronze, chemical patinas
Dimensions: 145mm x – 45mm- 35mm (largest figure)

‘A response to an anthropoid (human-shaped) lead coffin discovered buried in front of the Lossenham Priory altar. These figures are shown as empty vessels; they describe the notion of kenosis (self‑emptying), the emptying of self; vessels emptied, ready to be filled, receptive to the experience of a spiritual fullness (pleroma). The Carmelite mystic, St. John of the Cross, evoked imagery of the soul being emptied, purified, or made receptive – nada, a state of unknowing, is reflected upon in St. John’s ‘Dark Night of the Soul’.

Title: Held
Artist: Russell Burden
Date: 2026
Media: Cotton paper giclee, card, plaster, priory foundation chalk
Dimensions: 530mm x 310mm x 30mm

‘Here, the human is formed or moulded from the dust of the ground, or the clay of the earth, to be ultimately returned to the ground. ‘Thine hands have made me and fashioned me… Thou hast made me as the clay.’ (1611, Job 10:8-9). In the Summa Theologica written during the time of the Lossenham Priory (c. 1265–1274), Thomas Aquinas calls the body ‘the material principle’ as its matter is taken from earth; it is born into goodness and beauty. Beauty being a manifestation of the very goodness within things. In Heideggerian terms, humans may feel themselves as having been unwittingly cast or thrown into life and, perhaps, held by the Universe.’

Title: White Votive Bird
Artist: Russell Burden
Date: 2026
Media: White calcite alabaster
Font sculpture: Melvyn Evans
Hammered copper bowl: Alison Evans
Bird dimensions: 50mm x 40mm x 10mm

‘During ancient times, Calcite Alabaster was quarried just an hour and a half (as the bird flies) from Mount Carmel in the Te’omiman Cave. The white bird is a votive offering to the font’s water, water that still gathers in the pools beside the priory foundations. The whole piece is the combined work of three individuals: font, bowl, and bird, evoking the Carmelites’ spiritual charism in the Lossenham landscape during the medieval period.’ 

Title: Fluvial II, phase transitions
Artist: Russell Burden
Date: 2025/26
Media: Cotton giclee print
Location: Pett Level, Cliff End, East Sussex
Dimensions: 180mm x540mm (image)

‘Two geological sections of the Wadhurst Formation are shown. On the left, bioturbation is evident: tiny burrows filled with dark material in a lighter ground. On the right, layers of deposition reveal cyclical sequences of differing material influxes. The circle’s two hemispheres symbolise the circadian cycles of the sun and moon, creators of tides and currents in bodies of water.’

Title: Locus II, Arcadia
Artist: Russell Burden
Date: 2024
Media: Cotton giclee print, gold size, gold leaf, carbon ink
Dimensions: 395mm x 490 (image)

‘The surface of the deep, the reflections in a Lossenham pool. Sometimes the surface an opaque membrane, other times deep with transparency. Within the pool, the visible and the invisible are both present – the factual and the imaginal. It contains things bathed in the light of the world and those hidden within the realms of the unconscious.’

Title: Timefulness III, a place between stars
Artist: Russell Burden
Date: 2025
Media: Bracket clock, clock plate, antique bead and mother-of-pearl boot stud
Dimensions: 370mm x 370mm x 68mm

‘Here the face of the artist’s childhood clock has been removed to reveal what lies behind, a worn steel backing plate with a sense of the night sky. The central hand hole now filled with a foraged boot stud of mother-of-pearl and, reminiscent of the planet Earth, a sodalite bead inhabits the winding hole. Three brass mechanism posts complete the constellation, and where hands that measured the minutes and struck the hours once orbited numerals, a celestial diorama of timefulness has emerged.’

Title: Pietra Dura
Artist: Russell Burden
Date: 2021
Media: Cotton giclee print
Location: Cliff End, East Sussex
Dimensions: 610mm x 545mm (image)

‘The strata and fallen blocks at Cliff End evoke a sea-worn sense of the geological sequence beneath the Lossenham landscape. These silts, sandstones and iron formations underpin the clay-laden matter of the artist’s residency. A particular horizon high above the beach holds a fossil-rich archive in which disarticulated iguanodons, crocodiles, turtles and armoured fish abound.’

Title: Beyond the Rush of the Air
Artist: Russell Burden
Date: 2025
Production: Hydrophone field recording, audio processing, various instruments
Hand crafted violin bow played by: Melvyn Evans
Location: By Priory Field, Lossenham, Kent

‘Beneath the surface of a Lossenham pool, inaudible to the human ear, lies an unexpected acoustic ecology of insect stridulations and hydrological sounds. This has inspired a music of shimmering drones, a complex microcosm of tiny harmonies punctuated occasionally by instruments and the layered tones of single violin strings drawn by a bow made of yew.’

Title: Uncertain Boundaries, a Lossenham residency
Artist: Russell Burden
Film by: Kit Warren
Media: Digital video
Sound and mixing: Kit Warren and Russell Burden
Editing and colour: Kit Warren
Additional recordings: Russell Burden
Cello improvisation: Rachel Dawson
Duration: 38mins
Production period: 2024/25

‘A film by Kit Warren about Russell Burden’s art residency at Lossenham explores a selection of work across various media and related practices. This includes a variation of track two, ‘A Charm to Weave Belonging’ from Russell’s suite of musical compositions, ‘Lossenham Frequencies’, featuring cello played by Rachel Dawson.’

Headphones and full-screen viewing recommended…