Sarah Sempley

Sarah Sempley is showing at Highdown Gallery from 15th May to 23rd May 2027. It's a short run — just over a week — so if you're planning to head over, you'll want to pick a day and stick to it rather than leaving it until the final weekend.

The gallery is part of Highdown Gardens, a chalk garden in the South Downs National Park that Sir Frederick Stern spent 58 years creating. His collection of rare, chalk-tolerant plants has been admired since 1910, and he wrote A Chalk Garden and The Study of the genus Peonia (1946) along the way. He was also the first to describe the snowdrop species Galanthus rizehensis. The gardens draw around 80,000 visitors a year and home a historic water feature now powered by an off-grid solar system, a Champion tree — the Chinese Fringe Tree, introduced to the UK in 1845 — and a pop-up shop run by volunteers. Highdown Gallery is the estate's exhibition space, and Sempley's show sits on the gallery's provisional list of artists and exhibitions for 2027.

It's a good spot for a slow afternoon: you can spend as much time as you like with the work in the gallery, then wander through the gardens. The gardens are in Worthing, so if you're coming from further afield, you've got the coast nearby to make a proper day of it. The exhibition runs from 15th May to 23rd May 2027 at Highdown Gallery, within Highdown Gardens.