Sandham – Easter Events
We are delighted to offer our visitors from the 5th March until the 3rd of May the chance to view Daily Quests exhibition by Hampshire artist Ed Saye. It brings together a new body of work created in response to Sir Stanley Spencer’s epic paintings inside the chapel.
Saye’s paintings enter into a quiet, speculative dialogue with one of the most extraordinary works of British art of the twentieth century. His longstanding admiration for Spencer was reawakened while reflecting on themes of remembrance and everyday ritual for an exhibition at Chapel Arts Studios, Andover in 2025.
Spencer’s response to war was so defiantly unwarlike. Not battles, but floors being scrubbed, beds being made bread eaten. Intimate, bodily, repetitive. Profound in their commonplace. He wondered if he could follow that logic ; painting his present , not as spectacle, but as the observance of the routine and ordinary.
Spencer’s paintings transform memory into something devotional and immersive. Saye’s paintings similarly unfold as a loose, auto biographical cycle, populated by recurring male figures, avatars of the artist himself, who drift through surreal, dusky landscapes suffused with otherworldly glow.
His paintings are full of middle aged men like him playing golf, mowing lawns or eating a meal with the family. They are sometimes pensive, sometimes radiant, sometimes both. There’s not much happening, except maybe the low key drama of just being.
Easter Sunday 5th April – Poetry and Painting
join us for a deep dive with a Chapel Steward into the Resurrection of the Soldiers, a monumental 18 foot high scene depicting soldiers rising from the dead clutching white crosses and handing them to Christ. This followed by a short performance of First World War poetry.
Opening Times
Thursday – Sunday and Bank Holiday Mondays 11am to 3pm.
Admission adult £12, child (5-17) £6.60 Family (2 adults up to 3 children) £30.
Entry free (including the Ed Saye exhibition) with National Trust Membership
Email: sandham@nationaltrust.org.uk or call 01635 278394
Related articles: Previous article from National Trust (Sandham Memorial Chapel)