On Thursday, January 23rd the full-time Visual Arts students visited the Jerwood Gridshell at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum. The visit was organised by Pernille Fraser, currently in the second year of her MFA, as the first in what we hope to be a series of visits culminating in an exhibition of work later in the year.

The Weald and Downland Museum neighbours West Dean College. It spans 50 acres and is home to 45 timber-frame buildings dating from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries. All the buildings on site have been rescued from destruction or relocated for conservation―for example, a sixteenth-century farmhouse in Folkestone was in the path of the Channel Tunnel and was dismantled, brick-by-brick, and rebuilt at the museum. The Weald and Downland also houses a large collection of artefacts and tools relating to rural trades. The Jerwood Gridshell was built in 2002 and has two main purposes: to…