Festive favourite artists open houses opens to Brighton and Hove for winter 2023

Celebrating its 41st year, the focus of the winter festival is Christmas, with venues selling a range of artworks and handmade crafts as unique gifts. Many houses also offer a glass of something mulled, and a chance to meet the maker - perfect for a winter weekend. Houses are online, so you can choose an area of town to explore, or simply look for your favourites on https://aoh.org.uk/.

The Artists Open Houses 2023 Winter Festival offers a range of delights such as work by celebrated painters Clara Wilkinson and Faye Bridgwater, and makers including Kate Jenkins' extraordinary crocheted food plates. Meanwhile, make sure to see Judy Dwyer’s fabulous sewn creatures and Helen Twigge-Molecey’s beautiful mouth-blown glass Fungi sculptures. Christmas shopping-wise don’t miss 11 Welbeck open house for great textiles, jewellery and ceramics. Further highlights include The Studio Gallery for work by printmaker Hannah Forward, as well as Emma Carlow’s brilliant Mexican influenced clay whistles. For a different experience visit The Pink Door open house for a family show, including photography performance art and spoken word performed by AFLO. the poet.

When buying from AOH for Christmas you are safe in the knowledge that your money is going straight to the maker, and that you are supporting artists’ careers in the process. There is a fantastic choice of work to buy this Christmas, including ceramics, textiles, paintings, jewellery, original prints and many other artworks by both emerging and established artists.

Judy Stevens, AOH Director, said, “We are delighted to launch this winter's festival with some well known houses returning for 2023, as well as a range of new venues to explore. This time of year in Brighton & Hove is always magical, as the cold weather arrives the open houses provide a great opportunity to buy gifts for friends and family in the warmth of artists' homes. It's a great way to discover new arts and crafts from Sussex makers and meet members of the local creative community. We hope you will join us to visit open houses in your neighbourhood, as well as those further afield, and support our fantastic range of artists and makers across the city and beyond.”

A new addition for Winter 2023 will be the charity Outside In, at Hove Museum, who will take part in Artists Open Houses for the first time. Outside In www.outsidein.org.uk provides a platform for artists encountering significant barriers to the art world and its national open exhibition, which features 80 artworks on the theme of ‘humanity’, will be opening at Hove Museum of Creativity on 25th November 2023 and will run until 21st January 2024. This represents the final leg of a national tour for Humanity, which initially opened at Sotheby’s Old Bond Street in January 2023 before touring to Project Ability in Glasgow. Sussex is the birthplace of Outside In and numerous local artists have work included in the show. Outside In artists have interpreted humanity from a wide variety of perspectives, both personal and global, and the work on show includes paintings and drawings, sculpture, ceramics, photography, film and performance pieces.

Artists Open Houses

Artists Open Houses (AOH) helps artists connect with audiences in self-curated, non-traditional art spaces; which means usually (but not exclusively) artists’ own homes. To this end they co-ordinate and promote open house festivals, during May alongside the Brighton and Fringe Festivals, and a Winter festival in November/ December. Involvement in AOH festivals is open to anyone living within the 01273 landline telephone code area. The ethos is inclusive rather than selective, encouraging participation from artists and makers of all ages, at all stages of their careers and from all parts of the community, including school and college students and artists who might otherwise be excluded or marginalised from the art world mainstream.

AOH is also commemorating a long history of education partnerships, and students and emerging artists are especially welcome this year. Many of its founders were working in the region’s art colleges when the movement began in the 1980s; they recognised the enormous benefits that working on projects alongside professional artists brings to art students. AOH is pleased to continue to provide this platform to support students and graduates following the disruption of the pandemic.