Art in Suffolk

Suffolk is Constable country, the county whose water meadows, mills and skies John Constable turned into some of the most famous landscape paintings in the world, and where Thomas Gainsborough was born in Sudbury. His birthplace is still a working gallery and museum, which tells you something about how the county carries its history: not as heritage under glass but as somewhere artists continue to show.

Suffolk's contemporary scene is the most dispersed in the region. There is no single dominant city. Instead a chain of towns each holds its own gallery and its own cluster of artists, from Aldeburgh and Snape on the coast through Woodbridge, Halesworth and Framlingham to Sudbury, Bury St Edmunds, Lowestoft and Ipswich. It is also the most three-dimensional. Sculpture and installation are more strongly represented among Suffolk artists than anywhere else in the region, and the coast supplies the subject: the shingle and Cold War ruins of Orford Ness, the Alde and Deben estuaries, the reactors at Sizewell, and the marshes behind the sea wall.

Where to see it: Snape Maltings, Gainsborough's House in Sudbury, the Aldeburgh Gallery, Halesworth Gallery, 303 Projects in Lowestoft, Christchurch Mansion in Ipswich and Moyse's Hall Museum in Bury St Edmunds. Suffolk Open Studios opens studios across the county each summer.