“In the old tram yesterday rolling to Bruges, the whole of Flanders is waking up...with its willow edges and great grass fields, where you can already detect the growth of spring... I’d like to share every impression with you.”
Marcelle van Caillie, 1955
ExploreTheArch’s summer project is always our time to consider migration. On the centenary of her birth, we honour the life of remarkable Belgian artist Marcelle van Caillie who yearned to settle in Britain with her lover and to paint.
Experience Marcelle’s never-before-published letters to discover what women daring to divorce in the 50s risked losing in gambling with a bewildering, tortuous legal system.
And at once meet spirited Marcelle, the visionary female painter existing apart from her fellow human beings, walking alone on the grassy dykes of Belgium and contemplating a lover over the water in England who recognised and valued her talent.
Come to know a female painter on an artistic journey that reflected the foremost avant garde preoccupations of the time because she was brave enough to seek freedom to develop her practice in Britain. A Belgian who lost her beloved childhood wood to the Nazi policy of clearing landscapes that harboured resistance fighters and who placed distance between her self and the wounded land to honour those trees for the rest of her life.
“I am overflowing with joy-thus try to be in Victoria to meet the morning boat”
ExploreTheArch's core team gear up for the culmination of this Anglo-Belgian project, two years in development. With thanks to BOZAR's archive department and Akiko and Henry Sanford, owners of the archive that has inspired the work.
Opens 29 July 2019 at ExploreTheArch's unique experiential theatre venue in St Leonards on Sea. Tickets available to the public from 10 June. For Eventbrite discount code please join our mailing list.
Tickets at Eventbrite.
Tickets available locally without booking fee
at The Bookkeeper Bookshop and
Printed Matter Bookshop.
Performance dates:
29 July - 4 Aug, 6-11 Aug, 13-17 Aug @8pm
31 July, 2 Aug, 4 Aug, 11 Aug @5pm
