HESTERCOMBE is a shining light for the arts in Somerset.

To help it shine an artistic light on county artists, it has been awarded a grant of £69,000 from Arts Council England to continue its gallery and arts programme.

This year, thanks to this grant plus additional funding from Taunton Deane Borough Council, it will see more than ten artists engaging with the gardens, landscape, archives, buildings and visitors.

Hestercombe is also hoping to engage more people in events and activities through a series of new exhibitions featuring high profile contemporary artists, thanks to the funding.

The gardens will be hosting two new artist commissions as Hestercombe moves towards becoming a national centre for art and landscape.

The next exhibition being held at Hestercombe Gallery, is entitled Regions of Light and opens to the public on Saturday, March 18 and runs until Sunday, July 2.

It will showcase works from the artist and poet the Rev. John Eagles (1783 to 1855) together with contemporary artists Jem Southam, Rebecca Chesney and Paul Desborough.

The title of the exhibition is taken from a line in a John Eagles poem, alluding to the visual diversity within the show, which features photography, paintings, sculpture, objects, words and film.

The Rev. John Eagles painted at Hestercombe in the early 1800s and was an artist, poet and writer.

Original works will be exhibited alongside those by a contemporary photographer, abstract painter and multi-media artist who all make artwork in response to landscape or place.

Amongst those taking part is Jem Southam who is one of the UK’s leading photographers.

He is renowned for his series of colour landscape photographs, beginning in the 1970s and continuing until the present.

Southam’s subjects are predominately situated in the South West of England where he lives and works and he observes the balance between nature and man’s intervention and traces cycles of decay and renewal.

Rebecca Chesney is interested in how we perceive land: how we romanticise, translate and define urban and rural spaces.

She looks at how politics, ownership, management and commercial value all influence our surroundings and she has made extensive investigations into the impact of human activities on nature and the environment.

Paul Desborough’s paintings are set to challenge our assumptions about the nature of painting as he pushes the material properties of acrylic, his paintings eschew the conventional bond between medium and support, and in turn celebrate the physical materiality of the paint.

Often site-specific, his work blurs the boundaries between sculpture and installation, exploring the formal limits of painting and its relationship to art historical canons.

Throughout the year another five artists will be researching and making new work for other spaces.

Sarah Bennett, Megan Calver and Philippa Lawrence’s artworks will be shown in winter 2018. During 2017 they will present their endeavours through artist dialogue sessions.

The arts venue will also host two residencies collaborating with its gardening team with artists Jennie Savage and Neville Gabie.

Following a research trip to China, Hestercombe will host a Chinese artist later this year alongside a programme of residential workshops and events.

For information on all the events at the Hestercombe Gallery and the Gardens, visit hestercombe.com.