Events:
In Plane Sight
5 - 27 July 2025
Window Gallery
Phoenix Art Space, Brighton
Thursday 24 July, 6pm - 7pm
Matthew Burrows MBE & Michelle ‘In Conversation’
Matthew Burrows MBE is a contemporary British painter, a course leader of TURPS Hastings, and founder and director of Artist Support Pledge - a global movement that supports artists and makers. Matthew lives and works in East Sussex and is represented by Vigo Gallery in London.
Saturday 26 July, 11am - 12.30pm
’Art, Activism & the Arms Trade’
Panel discussion with Anna Stavrianakis, Louise Purbrick & Michelle Cobbin. Chaired by Katy Beinart
Anna is professor of International Relations at University of Sussex and Director of Research and Strategy at Shadow World Investigations.
She researches and teaches on the international arms trade, UK arms export policy, militarism and global insecurities.
Louise is a writer, activist and tutor at the Royal College of Art, whose work is devoted to understanding the material culture of everyday life
and interpreting the landscape of extractivism, incarceration, exploitation and migration.
Katy is an artist and a senior lecturer at the University of Brighton.
This short film (4 mins) accompanies the exhibition:
Sentinels
Observer
https://www.michellecobbin.art/paintings/bearing-witness
Background Noise 4
Lament
Home Guard
Sheep Path
Contemporary British Painter Exploring Peace Through Art
Michelle Cobbin’s artwork explores ideas about the meaning and the experience of peace. Inspired in equal parts by her insight meditation practice, the natural beauty of the South Downs in Sussex, where she lives, and her roots in the Fens of East Anglia.
One of the ways Michelle explores ideas about peace is through an overtly political lens. Active in today’s growing peace movement, her thought-provoking paintings highlight the impact of US military weaponry permanently stationed in England. She draws on her childhood experiences of growing up next to an American airbase that housed nuclear weapons and, more recently, her participation in peaceful protests there.
She also makes paintings designed to evoke stillness, harmony, and simplicity. Her work offers viewers a moment of reflection, connection, and calm. Her abstract landscape paintings draw upon the dramatic impact of a horizon shaped by Suffolk’s vast skies and flat terrain, and wild flowers on the chalky terrain of the South Downs.
Her work invites the viewer to consider the meanings of peace, both personally, socially and globally.
Latest on Instagram