Mother and daughter Louise Dale Chalmers and Emily Chalmers on how exhibiting together has brought them closer – and their shared love of story telling

Hi Louise, This year you are opening your garden studio in Ditchling to exhibit your work along with your daughter, Emily’s. First of all, could you tell us a little about both your own and your daughter’s background as artists.
After being persuaded to follow a first career as a doctor, but always making art, I finally got my dream to go to art school when my daughters were grown up. I had got a Foundation Art Degree part time in between the two children and completed an MA in Fine Art in 2019, twenty years later! I won a student prize, joined several art collectives and went from strength to strength. I was recently selected for a group show in London this summer and I have an up coming show in Athens in September. Last year I was selected for a show in Vienna and two in London. People from around the world now buy my work, which is incredible: I have terrible artist imposter syndrome!

Ditchling, nestling at the foot of the South Downs – Louise Dale Chalmers

Emily’s background is theatre, scenography and costume design. She did postgraduate studies in America at Carnegie Mellon, then lived in New York, working across Broadway, film and TV with some big names like Nickelodeon, CBC, Universal and Sky, before moving back to the UK. The lifestyle didn’t work so easily with family life though, and she now runs the marketing and PR side of a global architectural lighting design studio with her husband, mostly from home in Sussex. She’s gradually finding her way back into her own art practice, now honed by years of professional rendering. In her current art works being shown, she is exploring motherhood, identity and all the strange transitions that happen when life changes shape.

Graceful Heights – Emily Chalmers

Your original training was as a scientist – is this an interest you both share?
Not really. In that respect we are different. I have published my ideas about how science and art research are pretty much the same. Both start with ideas or a hypothesis; then both test their theories and decide which results to progress. For me, it’s all experiments! When you think about it, as I had to for my MA, energy theories feature just as heavily in art as science, and form the backbone of most of my research led practice and my colourful artworks in oils, ink, silk or ceramics. I love the interaction between my own energy and the energies of my materials (and happy studio accidents…).

Emily pushed away from science when she was younger. She is dyslexic and says that school didn’t always make those subjects accessible. Art was the place where she says things made sense to her, where she could think clearly, make connections and communicate in a way that felt natural. Emily does say that she thinks we both share the instinct to research, experiment and follow an idea through, but that we arrive there from different directions.

How does your work inform each other’s – what synergies do you feel you have between your artist practices?
Although our styles and materials are not the same, we do both use textiles and colour. And we are both storytellers, incorporating narrative into the works, often from a female perspective. My mum (Emily’s Nan) was a seamstress and my dad (Emily’s grandad) was an upholsterer, so gorgeous fabric was always lying around all our homes! Maybe that is why Emily and I both love material and make textured works with layers of narrative and storytelling. We are both very tactile, intuitive and textural artists. Emily says that I work with more freedom and chaos in my process, in a good way! She says she comes at things through narrative, character, composition and detail. She thinks our practices meet in the story sitting underneath the surface.

What benefits do you feel you gain from exhibiting together?
Above all, it is fun! It has brought us closer together too, as friends. We are comfortable giving each other honest critique! I love seeing Emily talking happily to visitors about the stories in her work: I am a very proud mum, and the smile on her face when visitors buy her work is very special to me. Emily says that working together makes it feel less scary, as putting your art out into the world can feel exposing, especially when she has returned to it after a period of change.

Your grand-daughter is also having a role in your Open House on some days – would you like to tell us a bit about this?
Lily is now 5 years old and taking part in her second Artist Open Houses! She is a proliferative painter alongside me in the studio, and one recent visitor even paid her £2 for one of her bright and funny sketches! She entered for the RA Junior competition this year. She’s also running a Lily’s Lemonade and Brownie Stall in front of the studio, and is fast becoming a canny businesswoman!

Is there anything else you would like to tell us?
Being part of AOH is an annual treat for our whole family now. Welcoming hundreds of visitors in to wander through sculptures in the garden and squash into the studio so I have to stand outside gives me such joy. We always meet such lovely people from far and wide and I am thrilled that they like and buy our work, some taking it as far as Australia and Canada.

Visit: Dymocks End Studio
30 East Gardens, Ditchling, Hassocks, BN6 8ST
No3. on the Ditchling Trail

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