New exhibition at Sunny Bank Mills features Yorkshire artists

Sunny Bank Mills Gallery in Farsley is celebrating the lifetime’s work of two Yorkshire artists, ceramicist Loretta Braganza based in York and artist Sheila El-Hassani based in Leeds.

Loretta Braganza was born in Mumbai, India and came to the UK in 1965. She began her practice as a ceramicist in 1990 via a career in dance, graphic arts, textile design and sculpture. She now works from her ceramics studio in York.

Her distinctive style comprising taut edges, clean lines and complex mark making swiftly earned her exhibitions and commissions as well as awards from the Crafts Council and Arts Council England.

Her work is grounded in her training in sculpture and consists of abstract forms which she hand builds and then decorates with coloured slips from an austere colour palette.

Loretta said: “I am delighted to be showing my ceramics with painter Sheila El-Hassani at the beautiful Sunny Bank Mills Gallery.

The exhibition has been curated with much thought and skill by its new art director Anna Turzynski . The result is a marvellous interaction of ceramics and paintings - each in their own space but adding to the visual pleasure of the whole experience.

My latest series Fruit and Bloom which has never been shown before reflects the rich inspiration that these fruit remembered from my childhood continue to provide. Real fruit embody a feeling, aroma and luminosity of tropical colour while the imagined are stretched into surreal abstraction.”

Sheila El-Hassani studied at Leeds College of Art in the 1950s where she specialised in Graphic Art, graduating from the University of Leeds in 1955. She then entered the teaching profession, first in England and later in Iraq, where she travelled extensively with her husband, Mahdi, who was working for the United Nations at that time. It was while she was living in Iraq that she began to further her interest in drawing and painting; both personally, through sketching the everyday lives of people, and also through professional practice, producing freelance graphic design work for the Iraqi Ministry for Education and also for Iraqi Industries. Sheila would sketch on location in the streets, in the souks and around the mosques, drawing individuals and groups of people amid the social landscape of everyday life in Baghdad in the 1960s.

In 1970 Sheila returned to settle in her native Yorkshire with her family and to continue her career as an educator. After her retirement she developed a vast body of artworks: drawings, gouache paintings and pen & ink wash images of the stall traders, the environment and the public as they went about their everyday business in Leeds City (Kirkgate) Market. Many of the stalls and shops that Sheila has sketched and painted through the years have since ‘gone’ and become the stuff of memories, but her paintings and drawings are alive with the characters and stallholders who inhabited them.

Sheila has exhibited her paintings and drawings locally and nationally over many decades, and notably, her artworks were selected for inclusion in the Leeds City Art Gallery Open Exhibition for ten consecutive years, from 2000 – 2010.

Asking Sheila how she chooses whom to draw from all the endless passers-by, she said: “It’s an exciting adventure going on the bus to town prepared to draw… the anticipation of what I might see, who might appear. I don’t know what or whom I’ll see to draw, or if I will see anyone at all whom I want to draw. Sometimes I see no-one.

I’m open to receive and I’m receptive to it happening when I go among people. It’s to do with shape, rhythm, movement and legs… especially legs. It’s about bodies moving in space and often my drawings are sequential… one of my personal favourite drawings is of a girl in a bowler-style hat at the bus station. She was full of movement. She paused. I drew her and she spun off into more movement and I drew her again. The moment of connection with whom I choose to draw is totally unpredictable.”

Sunny Bank Mills arts director, Anna Turzynski said, “This exhibition takes you on a journey through the artistic development of both makers. It is fascinating to see the changes - some apparent , others more subtle that mark this journey through many series to the present day. You will glimpse familiar places, patterns and textures and delight in their hidden similarities. This is a unique chance to reflect on the work of these two local female artists as they exhibit together for the first time, and an opportunity to buy some gorgeous artworks.”

Loretta Braganza and Sheila El-Hassani. A Lifetime of Making is at Sunny Bank Mills Gallery until 13th October 2024.

Opening times: Tuesday-Saturday 10-4pm, Sunday 12-4pm. Closed on Mondays. Free entry.