Penlee House wins Exhibition of the Year

Penlee House Gallery & Museum are delighted to have won ‘Exhibition of the Year’ at the Cornwall Heritage Awards, hosted by Cornwall Council. We are also really pleased that our fantastic Tour Guides were Highly Commended in the Heritage Heroes category. The Tour Guides are an incredible team of six volunteers who research, write and deliver free public guided tours of the temporary exhibitions, enabling the public to engage with the exhibition on a deeper level.

The Gallery won the ‘Exhibition of the Year (larger venues)’ award for the exhibition Flora: 150 Years of Environmental Change in Cornwall, curated by Kurt Jackson. The exhibition, which ran from October 2024 to January 2025, was a collaboration between West Cornwall-based artist Kurt Jackson and Penlee House Gallery & Museum. As an artist and environmentalist, Jackson has been studying environmental change, and particularly the botanical landscape, which has changed considerably over the last 150 years. Using the collection at Penlee House and having researched other relevant Newlyn School paintings, Jackson worked with the Gallery to select historic paintings for the exhibition where flora and plant matter were discernible. He undertook meticulous research to pinpoint the artist’s original vantage point and then visited these locations, studying the change in the botanical landscape and making his own works to illustrate the changes and processes that have occurred over the last 150 years.

The resulting exhibition included 70 works, with 27 created by Jackson. Each section of the exhibition considered different types of flora, including seaweed, gorse, mosses and lichens. The juxtaposition of the historic works and Jackson’s works enabled visitors to see the impact of humans on the Cornish botanical landscape and the interpretation explained how man-made changes, for example in farming methods, disposal of garden waste and global warming have led to the change in plant life. The exhibition was eye-opening for visitors, confronting them with the stark realities of environmental change whilst offering hope for the future, showing where pockets of nature have survived and thrived.

Jackson says: “There has been amazing feedback for this exhibition both from the scientific community and the general public, so I suspected that it had gone down well! I am delighted that it has been recognised with this award; not just for myself but also for everyone else who worked alongside me. This project reflects my passion and concerns for the environment and the natural world, this is what underpins and informs my own practice. The agenda of how the natural world is faring needs to be given far more prominence and I am glad this exhibition has attracted so much attention and therefore played an important role in this process. I would like to thank Caroline Jackson, Zinzi and Fynn Tucker for assisting in the curatorial backup as well as the team at Penlee House and all those Cornish botanists and scientists that advised me.”

Penlee House is committed to raising awareness about environmental change and inspiring the audience to understand what they can do to minimise negative impacts on the environment. Our current exhibition The Shape of Things: Our Place in a Changing Climate embraces these themes, in delivering a community curated exhibition which looks at historic works through a climate lens.