It has been an extraordinarily creative year for art in Oxfordshire, says The Oxford Times arts writer Sarah Mayhew Craddock

The end of the year naturally calls for reflection, and 2015 has seen public art commissions popping up, new and ambitious arts festivals gaining momentum and a strong programme of exhibitions and interdisciplinary arts events punctuating the city and county.

2015 got off to a subtle, and contemplative start at Arts at the Old Fire Station with the fantastic HUE exhibition. This saw three Oxford-based artists, Jack Eden, Catherine Watson and Nick Wood, play with light as they responded to the theme of colour in an exhibition of new work that was accompanied by a programme of films, talks and workshops designed to enhance our appreciation and understanding of a subject that blends human experience and science.

At the bolder end of the spectrum, exhibitions don’t get much bigger than Ai Weiwei at Blenheim Palace. This marked the first in a series of inspired collaborations brought about by dedicated collector of contemporary art and founder of The Blenheim Art Foundation, Lord Edward Spencer-Churchill, alongside director Michael Frahm. Ai Weiwei, one of the most influential cultural figures of the 21st century, co-ordinated this show by correspondence and presented site-specific works alongside over 50 works that spanned three decades of his career.

In October the palace was handed over to the man hailed as the founding father of conceptual art, Lawrence Weiner for a bold show of his own site-specific art, which confounded as many viewers as it delighted.

Curated by the Sonic Art Research Unit (SARU) at Oxford Brookes University and co-promoted by OCM, Oxford’s annual audio-visual art festival, Audiograft, again impressed audiences in March, with standout works from Joseph Fairweather Hole (Leviathan’s Electrolarynx presented at The Story Museum) and Arno Fabre (Cloche, presented at OVADA) May saw the opening of a retrospective exhibition, A Life in Ceramics, by the ceramicist Rupert Spira at Oxford Ceramics Gallery. His labour-intensive, seemingly impossible works amazed with their intricacy.

Over at the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Simon Periton’s Alchemical Tree was unveiled. Symbolising growth, transformation, interdisciplinary collaboration and a quest for knowledge the work shimmers, crowned, standing proud as the centrepiece of Periton’s site-wide serial work Pollinator, the concept for which alludes to the fertilisation of plants through other life forms.

Titian to Canaletto: Drawing in Venice with a contemporary response by Jenny Saville opened at the Ashmolean in October and continues until January 10, giving us more time to visit to this exceptional exhibition. Curated in collaboration with the Uffizi in Florence this ground breaking exhibition, based on new research, traces three centuries of drawing in Venice.

Also still on show are the imaginary, constructed, audio-visual environments at Modern Art Oxford, FIELD by Anne Hardy (until January 10) – yet another stand-out exhibition, contributing to a stunning year of bold new work in the city.