Noble and Common gallery
Specialists in contemporary landscape painting

No. 19 Hop Market Court
Forgate Street
Worcester
WR1 1DL

 
sales@nobleandcommon.com

Noble and Common is a new gallery dedicated to new approaches to landscape painting. We work with artists whose practices engage with place, not just as scenery, but as subject, tension, and process. Our focus is on works that challenge and expand the conventions of landscape. We present paintings that are as much about perception and time as they are about terrain. 

With prices ranging from £200 to £8000, Noble and Common offers access to rigorously curated, original paintings by early, mid-career and established artists. We believe in supporting long-term practices and cultivating informed, committed collectors at every stage.

Our name, Noble and Common, references two varieties of hops; ‘noble’ and ‘common’ used to brew beer in Europe and the UK respectively. Housed in Worcester’s historic Hop Market, we draw from this context to ground our commitment to both tradition and experimentation.

Sales

Prices are available on display in the gallery or on demand via email, sold works come with a certificate, invoice and exhibition provenance where applicable. Most paintings have been made recently and come from the artist’s studio. You can buy online however we recommend seeing the work in the gallery or we can arrange to bring a selection of works to you.

Monthly single painting shows.

Each month, Noble and Common selects a single painting to be shown in our market-facing window—offered at a reduced price as part of our commitment to access, equity, and physical engagement with art. This is not an online offer. There are no previews, holds, or early access. To see the work—and to acquire it—you must come to the gallery. We believe art should be encountered in person, through presence, proximity, and time. Our ‘window-work’  invites an unmediated relationship between viewer and object, in public view but privately resonant. It’s our way of helping more people own original art, while still ensuring the artist is fairly supported.

On Consignment
Exhibitions and Art Markets

Hops vs. Art
Opening : 24th September 2025

Press Release

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Hops vs. Art
Opening : Wednesday 24th September 2025
-} refreshments served courstesy of Company Drinks
24.09.25 - 10.11.25

Artists: Angelina May Davis, Elisha Enfield, Lewis Graham, Chris Shaw Hughes,  Isaac Jordan, Ispahani Mukah, John Timberlake. Supported by Company Drinks

The Hop Market in Worcester, where our gallery now stands, was historically a site of lively commerce, where farmers, traders, and brewers met to exchange one of the region’s most valuable crops. This exhibition draws a parallel between that history and the contemporary art market, asking: what kinds of value are exchanged in both?

At first glance, the hop market and the art market might seem unrelated — one rooted in agriculture, the other in culture and commerce. But look closer, and shared qualities begin to emerge. Both are spaces of negotiation and trust. In the hop market, value was determined through handshakes and expert knowledge; in the art world, worth is just as fluid — debated, perceived, and deeply personal. Both markets honour unseen labour. Hops are cultivated, harvested, and dried through seasonal cycles of care, while artworks are researched, wrestled with, and revised, often over months or years. What appears for sale is only the surface of a much longer process.

These markets are also inherently social. Where farmers, brewers, and traders once gathered to talk and trade, artists, collectors, and audiences now meet in conversation and exchange. Both reflect something deeper about local identity. Hops once defined Worcester’s economy and its outward-facing character; today, art continues to explore and challenge how we see this place — and ourselves within it.

And perhaps most fundamentally, both markets are about transformation. Hops become beer. Ideas become artworks. Materials are turned into meaning. In each case, value — in all its forms — is brewed or painted, drawn, shaped, and shared.

At Noble and Common, we open our doors with this inaugural exhibition, Hops (Market) Vs. Art (Market ) — a celebration of shared histories, marketplaces, and cultural exchange.

Artists Biographies

Lewis Graham (b.2001) born in Birmingham, and currently living and working in Worcester, Graham's work is about a relationship with place and landscape, in particular the Client Hills south west of Birmingham. Intuitively, Graham has developed a 'sense of place' in his work and for the current time, this small group of hills that divide the West Midlands from Worcestershire and Warwickshire are the fertile ground for his paintings and drawings. Historically, the hills have their own stories of lore from Roman skirmishes to St Kenelm's martyrdom, as described in legends, which occurred when he was beheaded in the Clent Hills by Askobert, his sister's lover. In the 18th century, George, 1st Lord Lyttelton installed the Lyttelton follies; a Greek temple, an Egyptian obelisk, a medieval castle and ‘Stone Age’ standing stones, all created between 1747 and 1758  designed by Lord Camelford, Thomas Pitt of Encombe, Henry Keene, James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, and Sanderson Miller. In recent history, the Client Hills have been, and continues to be a place of recreation for the West Midlands work force, an escape away from the industry of the Black Country and Birmingham. The hills are flanked by the towns, villages and road systems, the barrier to the sprawl of The West Midlands conurbation, only second in size to Greater London, home to over 2.5 million people. 

“I am drawn to the hills. Maybe I escape there? Clent is why I make landscape paintings, they were the only landscape growing up. From up there you can literally throw a stone into Birmingham, from Weasley you can peer over Longbridge the ghost of the old Rover car factory, and on a clear day you can make out Dudley Castle and Zoo. At first I was making landscape paintings and drawings of  the places familiar to me, over time I realised the hill paintings  represent much more, they are my sense of this place. Ambitiously I want Clent to be, what Cookham was to Stanley Spencer or Northampton is for Alan Moore. For now it is a focus on or an escape to the hills! Like, for so many others, the hills always were and remain an escape for people, be it a Lord pretending, playing amongst his follies or the working people of the Black County seeking fresh air the hills both except and repel us, dividing the green shires from the Black Country and Brum.”                                                 -Lewis Graham in artist talk at Manchester Art Gallery

Biography
Lewis Graham graduated with a degree in Fine Art Painting in 2023 from Worcester University, recent exhibitions include; Vilage Greens, Hillsides and Conurbations (2025) with artists; George Shaw, Angelina May Davis at Paradise Works. Stop the Chaos, Turn the Page (2024) Divison of Labour with artists; The Art School Project, Dean Kenning, Ned James, Daniel Pryde-Jarman, Ruth Ewan, Angelina May Davis , Issac Jordon. The Stones Project (Glossop 2024) with artists; Manchester School of ArtFour researchers from the Visual Culture Research Hub, making, curating, writing, seeking, experiencing stones. Tree & Leaf - Division of Labour with artists; Harminder Judge, Gavin Wade, Mark Essen, Vanley Burke, Harrison & Wood, Matt Westbrooke, Luke Routledge, Andrew Lacon, Stuart Whipps, Elisabeth Rowe, Joanne Masding, Simon & Tom Bloor, James Winnet, Yelena Popova, Rafal Zar

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Angelina May Davis‘ paintings are fabrications, plundering imagery from childhood TV and art history. She is interested in thinking about the past and what shapes us, using the transformative act of painting to reflect on history and culture as well as her own sense of belonging. Davis revists the rural English landscape of the 1970s, restoring the English elm as depicted in remembered films, archival footage and English landscape painting, as metaphor for loss and longing, recalling a nostalgic and insincere past. Her paintings are claustrophobic worlds in which there is ambiguity, artifice and the possibility of things just out of view.

Biography
Angelina May Davis graduated with a degree in Fine Art Painting in 1988 from Coventry Lanchester Polytechnic and completed an MFA at UCE in 1998. Throughout those years she was involved in setting up and running various collaborative artist studios in Birmingham. Raising a family from 1997 she moved her practice to the dining table for 10 years before beginning to make large paintings again in a studio from 2007. In 2020 she began the Turps Banana Correspondance Course, completing 2 years. She had 2 large paintings included in Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2021 and Blue Elms was acquired by the Government Art Collection. She reached the 2nd round of John Moores in 2020, was shortlisted for the Jacksons Painting Prize in 2020 and 2021, and her large scale watercolour ‘Pond’ was selected by Juliette Losq for the Outstanding Water Colour Prize in 2021. She is represented by Division of Labour.

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Elisha Enfield b. 1989, born Milton Keynes, UK lives and work in High Wycombe. Elisha is an award-winning UK-based artist. Her work delves into the layered histories of human rituals, examining the shifting boundaries between absence and presence.  Drawing from stories of fire and funerary rites, her paintings explore the macabre beauty of shared practices that traverse joy, reverence, and loss. These moments, tethered to history, resonate with contemporary questions about how we remember, mourn, and celebrate. Throughout her work, Enfield explores how collective rituals and spectral narratives help us navigate a world without the ones we love, inviting the viewer to linger in liminal spaces where memory and myth entwine.

Biography
Enfield studied painting at the University of Brighton, graduating in 2011. Recent achievements include selection for the BEEP Painting Biennial, John Ruskin Prize, and ING Discerning Eye, where she has received both the Landscape and Midlands Prizes. Winner of Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year 2022, her work is held in public and private collections worldwide.

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Chris Shaw Hughes currently works in Lancing, UK. Through painstakingly crafted paintings and drawings, Chris Shaw Hughes documents important geographical terrains and significant historical snapshots that are at once both visually arresting and thought provoking. His highly detailed work captures moments of tension that are often overexposed in the news media, and asks us to reflect on their meaning in greater depth. Shaw Hughes’ practice is heavily engaged with methods of mechanical reproduction- using both photography and carbon paper in his current practice. Although he has previously worked using a diversity of media, the employment of carbon paper has allowed him to investigate a kind of ‘negative’ aesthetic, seen in the dark serenity of his work. 

Biography
Chris Shaw Hughes completed both his BA and MFA at the University of Brighton (2005-2010) In 2010, his work was selected to be part of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries exhibition, which was shown at the Liverpool Biennial and at the ICA, London.

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Isaac Jordan  (b. 1998), lives and works in Manchester. Jordan draws inspiration from varied sources, including stills from 1970s science-fiction films. His practice is centred on the creation of imagined spaces and revolves around the development of focused series. In his minimal installations, his aim is to recreate a cinematic effect where the works become animated in the viewer’s imagination. 

Biography
Isaac Jordon graduated BA (Hons) Fine Art, University of the West of England, Bristol. He participated in the inaugural Apollo Painting School (2024), received the Haworth Trust New Graduate Award at Paradise Works (2022) and the Spike Island Graduate Fellowship (2020/21). Additionally, Jordan's work has been shortlisted for the BEEP Painting Prize  (2020), where his work was exhibited in Swansea.

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John Timberlake‘s (b.1967) practice and research as a fine artist engages principally with photography, painting and drawing, underpinned by the legacies and dialogics of conceptualism. Drawing on the Romantic tradition and the English Picturesque, in Timberlake’s work, landscape is inevitably the site of the trauma of history, it also resonates with the possibilities of recalibrations and renewals through imagined futures. Whilst Timberlake’s work is principally pictorial, it is not bound by one medium, nor one single style: his concerns as an artist are expressed through painting, photography, collage, drawing, sculpture and, occasionally, text.

Biography
John Timberlake is a practising artist and teaches Fine Art Studio Practice at Middlesex University, London. He holds a PhD in Art from Goldsmiths and is an alumnus of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. John co-edited the artist run publication everything magazine from 1994 until its demise in 2002, and is the author of Landscape and the Science Fiction Imaginary (Intellect / Chicago UP, 2018). John’s exhibitions include Beyond the Wall Lies the Ocean at Sabine Wachters Gallery, Knokke-Heist; For Want of (not) Measuring at Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich (2024); Survival Unit (a collaboration with sculptor Dean Kenning) at Project Space Plus, Lincoln (2022); Artist’s Impression: Mangled Metal (2015), Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck; We Are History at Beaconsfield Gallery (2014); Turning Points Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest (2014); Catalyst: Contemporary Art and War, Imperial War Museum North (2013); Dark Skies, Adam Gallery Te Pataka Toi, Wellington, NZ (2012); and Beyond the Picturesque, SMAK, Ghent and MARTa, Herford (2009). Timberlake’s work is in the collections of the Imperial War Museum, London; the University of Greenwich; Barts Royal London NHS Trust, the West Collection, Oaks, Pennsylvania, and private collections internationally. As of 2025, John Timberlake is currently working on a Maltings Trust commission for a sequence of large-scale landscape works drawing inspiration from the littoral and estuarine locations of Berwick upon Tweed, Northumberland.

Ispahani Mukah is a Cameroonian-born visual artist based in Birmingham, widely recognised for his evocative biro drawings. His work explores the human form with intimacy and depth, capturing the quiet drama of everyday life through spontaneous, layered lines. Mukah’s practice is deeply rooted in technique. He draws with a rhythm of repeated lines that build and pulse across the page, creating a sense of vibration and interconnection. These layers are not only visual but emotional, forming portraits that feel alive with presence and energy. At the heart of his approach is a love for simple tools. He works primarily with the ballpoint pen, an everyday object that becomes a powerful instrument in his hands. This choice reflects his belief that meaningful work can emerge from modest means, driven by intention, observation, and care. Mukah’s portraits are studies in stillness and presence. They reveal vulnerability, strength, and individuality. Each drawing is both structured and instinctive, reflecting a quiet intensity that invites close looking.

Biography
His work has been exhibited nationally at venues including the ING Discerning Eye, the Coventry Open, and the RBSA Drawing Prize. He was the global winner of the 2020 UNHCR Youth with Refugees Art Contest and won first prize at Birmingham Open 25.Beyond the studio, Mukah leads community workshops in the UK and Cameroon, using drawing as a tool for self-expression and connection. With academic backgrounds in Art History and Computer Science, he brings both analytical precision and emotional depth to his visual storytelling.