About your hosts
Paul and Paul, share their creative point of view with guests by distributing a carefully considered collection of contemporary art and found objects throughout Woolmarket House. Paul Barratt is a curator having trained in London at Goldsmith’s College, London University and the Royal College of Art. Paul worked for a number of contemporary art galleries in London at Antony D’Offay Gallery, Lisson Gallery, and New York at Gladstone Gallery, and as an independent curator in London. Paul Vater ran his own successful design agency, based in Ladbroke Grove, West London, specialising in corporate branding for 25 years. The agency had arts and cultural sector clients, local and national government clients, marketing agencies and several influential e-commerce websites. He still designs e-commerce websites and digital design for ‘in-house’ projects. Paul and Paul organise exhibitions of contemporary and applied art by artists and makers with a connection to East Anglia: Contemporary and Country.
FORMER RESIDENT AT WOOLMARKET - ARTIST GUSTAV METZGER (1926 - 2017)
‘Everything I know about activism, I learned in King’s Lynn’
Gustav Metzger was an artist and activist who lived at Woolmarket House for 8 years. Born in Nuremberg, Germany to his Polish parents, he escaped the Nazi regime and fled to Britain in 1939, under the Kindertransport initiative for Jewish children escaping persecution. While in Britain he pursued his interest in studying art and after the war studied at the Academy in Antwerp, before returning to Britain to live and work as an artist, choosing not to return to Germany. A few years after his return from Belgium he moved to King’s Lynn, to develop his artistic practice in various innovative ways, including as one of the first wave of artists who established the influential Fluxus movement. It was while in King’s Lynn that he developed a life-long interest in ecology, the environment and conservation, he campaigned to save the cottages of the North End fishing community from development. The campaign aroused his spirit as an activist. And two of the cottages he managed to save have since become True’s Yard Museum.
After a long career as an artist, creating concert visuals for British bands like The Who, exhibiting his work internationally and teaching in some of the country’s top art schools, it was perhaps appropriate that he held the launch event for one of his last art projects called “Remember Nature” at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and at art schools nationwide on 4 November, 2015. Remember Nature invited all artists to address the crisis within nature. He intended to bring awareness to the damages that continue to devastate our natural world. Remember Nature was organised by Metzger and curators to be a designated day of action. November 2025 marks its 10th anniversary, in which events are presented in numerous galleries and museums and artist groups across the country.
“The art, architecture and design world needs to take a stand against the ongoing erasure of species – even where there is little chance of ultimate success. It is our privilege and our duty to be at the forefront of the struggle. There is no choice but to follow the path of ethics into aesthetics. We live in societies suffocating in waste. Our task is to remind people of the richness and complexity in nature; to protect nature as far as we can and by doing so art will enter new territories that are inherently creative.”
Gustav Metzger 2015