Swansea College of Art | Dynevor Campus | De-la-Beche Street | Swansea | SA1 3EU Dates: Saturday 6th August - September 3rd 2016 Undegun | Regent Street | Wrexham | LL11 1SG Dates: Friday 7th October - 5th November 2016 visit: www.beepwales.co.uk for previews, opening times and satellite events
foreward Post Brexit, the urge to change the title of this exhibition to ‘This must be the place I ALWAYS wanted to leave’ was very tempting. The events of the past weeks have made me question what kind of place Wales really is becoming as the UK takes a giant backwards step out of the global community and into the unknown. The realisation that my home country wasn’t quite the all welcoming, friendly hospitable place I had been viewing through rose tinted nostalgic eyes all these years has left me in a semi-state of stunned bereavement. It isn’t quite time to pack my bags and book a one way flight to the most remote place on earth (Alaska would be that location but Rhyl would have the same effect), but it has for me changed the tone of the theme of this year’s Beep Painting Prize. The ‘must’ in the title is less assertive and the feeling is uncertain, this must be the place I never wanted to leave… isn’t it? The theme originally grew out of a series of group discussions at the Elysium gallery High street studios project space. Each month an artist takes up residence in the space to test new approaches to their practices and at the end of their stay a discussion takes place between the studio artists. Many of the studio incumbents are painters and the topics of the discussions gradually began to veer towards the effect the chance to work outside of their usual studio environment was having on the artists with the change in their painting styles being quite dramatic and more confident in most cases. Many of the artist’s studios had become cluttered over time with the usual mix of books, tools, ornaments, music systems, laptops and of course art work. The realisation dawned that in some cases their usual studio working environments had become less about creating work and more of a place to retreat to from the outside world. It seemed that when given the chance to work in a place free of all of this clutter it enabled the work to break free and soar. Discussions began to turn towards what certain spaces and places meant to people and how this translated into conversations in paint, the painterly excavation of memories, emotions and ideologies to explore an understanding of place. What does one feel when painting? Are you impulsive? Are you meticulous? Are the worlds and scenarios you create formed from a historical context? Abstract imaginings of a possible future? Or painting as a state of mind; a meditation to remove oneself from the world and become absent from a place. These thought processes laid the foundations for this exhibition Despite the upheaval and the uncertainty, one of the major elements of positivity is that Wales does have a thriving arts community which is at its best when working together. It is the partnerships formed between elysiumgallery, Swansea College of Art, Mission Gallery, Undegun, Arcade Cardiff in the absence of funding and the sharing of their resources that has made this year’s Beep Painting prize possible and one of the few artist led, financially transparent and FREE to enter competitions in the UK today. I’d like to thank all of the organisations, artists and helpers who have given up their valuable time and contributed their skills and never ending enthusiasm. It is this that will see us through the current gloom and come out fighting with a raised middle finger through the other side. Jonathan Powell Artist, Director elysiumgallery & curator of this exhibition. Jonathan Powell (B. 1975, Bangor, N. Wales) is a Swansea based artist who works primarily in painting and drawing. He is also a director and curator of elysiumgallery, Swansea that oversees local and international exhibitions promoting emerging and established artists and provides studios for 100+ artists over three venues in Swansea City Centre. Jonathan is also the founder of the Beep Wales International Painting Prize.
foreward The place I never wanted to leave In thought and in action, we are held by forms. At times, a moment of authenticity occurs that moves our minds beyond thought and beyond the present- as we try and attach it to the most tangible aspect of memory, we identify it as belonging to a place. We have a sense however, that this place is not fixed but a dynamic happening in time, a space in which relationships to our surroundings seem so finely tuned, multisensory, deep and evocative. We experience a sense of spirit and a place beyond the passage of time, it seems to slip as we attempt to capture and hold on to it, it turns into a memory of a memory. The initial authenticity in that original time and place becomes endlessly reflected in perception, our longing softens the edges of its materiality. In our imagination and senses we seek for this internal dwelling, but strangely we find it when we least expect to, at times in the most mundane and daily, a door opens and a breath enters like a whisper or a distant call. It resists definition, it escapes back into silence whenever we look too closely. In painting we abandon the desire to map its location, rather we seek to unearth the moment of its occurrence- in process and in image we attempt to give this nebulous meaning a form. Relationships of colours, of marks and forms, of movement in space, seem to echo the sound of a beating heart, of an original being, of a truth with no words to describe it. The metaphysical aspect of perception and creation moves in depth and is fundamentally personal and unique- this place that we paint shifts and vibrates, it overflows inwards where the senses intermingle and become one. Yet, objectively and in each other’s expressions we recognize the language of its authenticity, we see into the universality of its nature. The relationship of being, to time and to place becomes so deep and inseparable that at times is felt as an ongoing presence. That place then becomes a state of mind, a field of energy, a profusion of senses, perception and memory intermingled, a melting away of boundaries and temporality. The desire for giving it form in art is one of alchemy, love, magic-realization, transformation and transportation to the heart of timelessness. This place of authenticity reflects a profound sense of being. Our authentic self is revealed as a condition at once beyond the self and deep within it, all sense of scale removed, it is oneness. Dalit Shalgi-Leon RCA Dalit was born in Israel & has been based in Wales since 2001. Before moving to Wales Dalit lived and studied art at The Hague & then completed her BA at Swansea College of Art in 2010 & an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art, London 2011-13. This was followed by her first solo exhibition at Oriel Q, Narberth & was a participating artist in Beep 2014: Through Tomorrows Eyes & the elysiumgallery led Colorado & Swansea artists exchange in 2014. Dalit was also recently the Osi Osmond drawing book prize winner at UWTSD Carmarthen followed by her solo exhibition ‘Time signatures’ at elysium gallery in May/June as a part of this years Beep programme of events.
judges Jonathan Watkins
Shani Rhys James
Jonathan Watkins has been Director of Ikon Gallery since 1999. Previously he worked for a number of years in London, as Curator of the Serpentine Gallery (1995-1997) and Director of Chisenhale Gallery (1990-1995). He has written extensively on contemporary art and curated a number of large international exhibitions including the Biennale of Sydney (1998), Facts of Life: Contemporary Japanese Art (Hayward Gallery, London 2001), Quotidiana (Castello di Rivoli, Turin 1999, Tate Triennial (2003), Shanghai Biennale (2006), Sharjah Biennial (2007), Negotiations (Today Art Museum, Beijing 2010) and the Guangzhou Triennial (2012). He was on the curatorial team for Europarte (Venice Biennale, 1997), Milano Europa 2000, (Palazzo di Triennale, Milan 2000), and Riwaq (Palestinian Biennial 2007). He curated the Iraqi Pavilion for the Venice Biennale 2013.
Shani Rhys James is one of Wales’ most celebrated artists who has won various prestigious awards such as the 2003 Jerwood Painting Prize, Royal eisteddfod Gold Medal for Fine Art and the BBC Wales Visual arts Award. In 1993 she won the Hunting/ Observer Art Prize, achieved second place in the BP National Portrait Award in 1994 and in the same year was elected to the Royal Cambrian Academy. Rhys James was made an MBE, for services to art, in the 2006 New Year’s Honours list. In 2007 she won the Glyndwr Award, presented by MOMA, and was awarded an honorary fellowship from University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. In 2008 she gained an honorary fellowship from Hereford College of Art
Both Shani Rhys James & Jonathan Watkins will choose the main prize winner from the final exhibitionwhich will be announced on the opening night. The artists for the Beep2016 shows will be selected by elysium gallery director & Beep founder Jonathan Powell.
artists Susan Absolon . Sinead Aldridge . Kayde Anobile . Tom Banks . Pip Barrett . Jo Berry . Heather Brammeier . Philip Cheater . Jenny Chisholm . Minyoung Choi . Michelle Conway . Daniel Crawshaw . Paul Crook . Eugenia Cuellar . Gordon Dalton . Lara Davies . Lisa Denyer . Tom Down . Heather Eastes . Andrew Ekins . Louise Giovanelli . Gabriela Giroletti . Penny Hallas . Sky Kim . Ilona Kiss . Arron Kuiper . Paraic Leahy . Susanna Lisle . Catrin Llwydd . Jaya Mansberger . Enzo Marra . Mary McCrae . Anna McNeil . Liam O’Connor . Alan Rees-Baynes . Andre Stitt . Eifion Sven-Myer . Mircea Teleaga . Christopher Twigg . Richard Twose . Francisco Valdes . Lois Wallace . Tim Warren . Ian Watson . Laura Welsman . Fran Williams . Richard Williams . Camilla Wilson . Tong Zhang .
Susan Absolon One of the themes that recurs in my work concerns landscape as a place of conflict. In my painting, no man’s land, usually an uninhabited place without jurisdiction whose borders keep us apart, stands instead for our common ground, a place that belongs to nobody, inhabited by all. It represents the distance between here and there, between me and you, and the predicament we face in attempting to reconcile each other’s ideas of nationhood, territory, belonging and belief. “From the acid rains of heaven to the dripping fires of hell; each way is to perish.”* “No Man’s Land”, oil on linen, 120 x 150cm, 2015 http://www.susanabsolon.co.uk/
Sinead Aldridge This is the place I never want to leave: Painting is knitted into every aspect of the painter’s life. Sinead paints for maybe four to five hours and then moves between this and the many everyday chores of life: buying bread, travelling on the tram … then returns to paintings …......The paint layers up and, then, every aspect of life, from memories to chores to peripheral vision to looking, looking, looking becomes a collage inside the layered paint, a collage put on linen and then built over and over. It is there, even when you can’t see it anymore, like the tree rings that are hiding underneath the bark. You know they’re there so that you don’t have to look. You can just assume. Then the hidden depth … gives depth. It stays there like a ripple. Where does the ripple lie? In the water? In the fabric of the world -Dr Tony Partridge 2015 Sinéad Aldridge Born in Belfast studied Fine Art at Camberwell College of Art London BA Hons Painting 1985 . MA in Visual Arts Practices IADT Dublin 2010. Solo Exhibitions: after image Fenderesky Gallery Belfast 2015. Unattainable/joy RHA Dublin 2010, Works & Days Sligo Art Gallery 2008. Group exhibitions: Kaleidoscope Smartno Slovenia 2014 Die Sprache ist das Haus in dem wir leben, Kunstlerverein Malkasten Düsseldorf.2012., Accrochage 1, Gorizia Italy 2010, Out Of Context Contemporary Irish Painting Archeus Gallery London 2004 and Irish Contemporary Art Galleri Weinburger Copenhagen 1999. Sinead lives and works in Berlin. “Blake”, oil on linen on board, 25 x 30cm, 2014 “Aristocratic”, oil on linen on board, 30 x 25cm, 2014 www.worksanddays.sineadaldridge.com
Kayde Anobile Kayde Anobile (1976) is an American Italian artist currently living in Istanbul, Turkey. She received her BFA from SAIC in Chicago, USA and her MA from Chelsea school of Art and Design in London, UK. Her work centers around the cognitive dissonance between opposing concepts and realities, is primarily driven by culture shock and the use of a wide range of artistic mediums. Tintype gallery, London, currently represents her. She has work in several notable collections including the Zabludowicz collection and Simmons & Simmons contemporary art collection based in London. As a serial migrant by choice, my extreme privilege had never been so apparent until I moved to Istanbul from London 4 years ago. This city was the Middle Eastern equivalent of Hong Kong and its history rivaled, perhaps bettered, that of London and Geneva, Switzerland. The dilapidated buildings that dot the city inspired and drew me in as no other abandoned buildings had ever before. They inspired a series of encaustic paintings layered with resin as a metaphor through paint of both transience and preservation, of subjective memory and objective reality simultaneously. Research informed me that many of them had belonged to ethnic minorities, mainly Greek, Armenian and Jewish people forced to abandon their lives in Turkey long ago as a result of repressive government policies. Having grown up and lived in five different cultures on various continents, the question of ‘home’ is a complicated one. These building are in a state of legal limbo, their histories slowly decaying into oblivion and yet they are firmly rooted in reality. As I write this, on June 17th, 2016, news just broke that the annual LGBTI pride march has been forbidden this year, after 13 years of allowing it. I am a lesbian. This must be the place I never wanted to leave. “Çukurcuma”, encaustic paint and resin on wood panel, 60 x 60cm http://www.kaydeanobile.com/
tom banks “The world of small children is a fragile construct of fact and fantasy.” Landscapes Of Fear, Yi-Fu Tuan, (1979) As a child I was taken on CND marches; I read the assorted CND leaflets left around the house; and acquired a large collection of anti-nuclear power badges. The fear of nuclear annihilation was constant. Also, at this time my dad was, confusingly, working at Dungeness Nuclear Power Station. His workplace consisted of a series of imposing, but beguiling, buildings situated on a bleak shingle outcrop jutting out into the English Channel. I found escape from this fear and bewilderment in television, in particular the 1950’s sci-fi films that were regularly on the telly at this time. One film that had a significant effect was Quatermass 2; a film in which, humans possessed by aliens worked in large industrial buildings. These incongruous manmade structures hid terrifying secrets that threatened life on earth…a bit like Dungerness…where my dad worked. It was, and still is, a confusing time, trying to resolve these contradictions. But the lure of childhood innocence can be enticing; to again, stand as a child in this landscape in front of these buildings of dread and experience what Immanuel Kant would describe as ‘quiet wonderment’ or ‘delightful horror’. Meta Vita II is a painting of buildings sitting quietly in a flat landscape surrounded a sky of flat dark colour, providing the viewer with an opportunity to stop, and cast a long lingering gaze over a scene, bereft of people. “MetaVita II”, oil on canvas, 60 x 60cm, 2016 www.tombanks.net
pip barrett I am a Welsh Artist originally from the small village of Llangynidr in mid-Wales but now living in Cardiff where I studied BA (Hons) Illustration and later a Master of Fine Art in 2015 where I received a distinction. My work explores an assemblage of my own pseudoautobiography, something that has interested me in my practise is the significance of fact and fiction in storytelling, a dramatisation of a recalled memories. Most of my work is based around places that I have seen or encountered, linking to the theme ‘This must be the place I never wanted to leave...’ through the idea that the place I never wanted to leave would be my memory. Each image is creating a documentation of my experiences, memories, thoughts and anxieties. My work creates a place where collected experiences are reproduced visually these then trigger a recall through the associations and personal significance for myself and the audience. “Peugeot”, oil on canvas, 110 x 110cm, 2016 “Cartref/Home”, oil and acrylic on canvas, 110 x 110cm, 2016 https://www.linkedin.com/in/pip-barrett-455734b1
jo berry Primarily dealing with the authenticity of the image in the digital age, I build new layers into the process of representation. Editing and re-photographing found photographic images, my paintings take on new unsettling meanings and truths. ‘Untitled 2016’ uses an image taken from the financial TV news channel, Media Money, which focusses on the advertising industry. It captures the harmonious moment where the end of one shot and the beginning of another merge to create a new image. The source material for this has been deliberately selected for its dry and abstract nature where visual references are hard to find. A new place has been created from a frozen point in time, where the viewer becomes a part of this by interpreting a new meaning into the work. Other recent work has been looking at stock photography as source material. These are photographs that can be bought from libraries and are often used in adverts. They strive towards some kind of perfection but I’m interested in the insincerity of these images and wish to decontextualize any narrative or create an anti-narrative. “Untitled”, 90 x 120cm, 2016 http://www.joberry.me.uk/
Heather Brammeier Heather Brammeier’s masterwork reinterpretations focus on the painting as destination. Masterworks are revisited time and again in both reproduction and real life, in conversation and in writing. The studio artist revisits a painting (or image of the painting) to renew inspiration, to learn from the work, and, after many viewings, to experience familiar emotional responses. The painting becomes an intellectual and emotional location beloved to the admirer. Brammeier’s relationship with certain masterworks (in particular, iterations of the stories of St. George and the Dragon and Laocoön) has led to travel to experience the artwork as it exists in the museum setting. Her masterwork reinterpretations draw either from the sense of intimacy resulting from personal visits, or from the longing for intimacy as yet to be realized. Brammeier exhibits widely throughout the United States. She has participated in a wide range of artist residencies including Yaddo (NY), Spiro Arts (UT), The Hambidge Center (GA), The Banff Centre (Alberta, Canada), and Pontlevoy Creative Residencies (France). Brammeier is Associate Professor of Art at Bradley University, and she is represented by Moberg Gallery in Des Moines, Iowa. “St. George and the Dragon (After Uccello)”, oil on canvas, 92 x 122 cm, 2013 http://heatherbrammeier.com/
philip cheater Cheaters previous work looked at Health and Safety and the environment it was used in. His latest work looks at the definition and the semiotics of space both internally and externally. In particular the nature of large scale facades and structures. This work not only investigates space through representation on a flat surface, but how we see a space through the use of perspective and basic form. Using materials that directly relate to the subject, as well as surfaces that allow the viewer to see beyond the space. The structures are incomplete or contain empty space so they are not anchored within the traditional notion of a landscape. While the use of perspective and scale is important, the lack of other objects and figures allow the painted space to be interpreted at any given scale depending on the viewer. “Reflections of the Outside�, enamel on mirrored steel, 150 x 50cm, 2015 www.fineartphil.com
Jenny Chisholm My practise is rooted in a, truth to the media I use, from pencil to paint, with an ongoing outlook to capture spontaneous marks. Currently my subject is Port Talbot. My family was deeply rooted in the Steelworks of Corby in Northamptonshire. Now Port Talbot`s legacy feels as fragile as Corby`s was in the Thatcher years. As an artist I feel I must document its impact on the landscape. Jenny Chisholm graduated from Hull University in 2007 with a BA (Hons) Fine Art, moving to Swansea in 2009 to complete PGCE Secondary Art and Design. She won the Welsh Towry Prize at the National Open Art competition in 2011. She is currently part of the Elysium Studio`s collective, and works as a freelance art educator for the Glynn Vivian art gallery. “This place makes this my home.(1)”, oil on canvas, 42 x 30cm, 2016 This place makes this my home.(2)”, oil on paper, 42 x 30cm, 2016 www.jennychisholm.com
Minyoung Choi Oneiric landscapes in my paintings are created by my memories that I keep pursuing and longing for. I feel the perfect place I never wanted to leave is lost. I feel it existed in my past. Maybe I just want to believe it was there when I was younger. I was surrounded by mysteries, Aesop’s fables and myths. I was closer to nature, which had special stories or perhaps I made them up. During my life, I have lived in several countries with big cultural differences. I could find similarities and differences among those places. Those varied colours, shapes and stories that I have seen are mixed. It is a day when a rainbow appears; I drink tea having a picnic and a frog wearing a backpack comes by. There are tropical trees and Christmas trees around me. They are all transparent and light. Things are imperfect and short-lived in real life. I collect these objects and moments in order to make them exist once again and together this time, by recollecting, rebuilding and celebrating. “Tea Time with a Frog”, Oil on canvas, 51 x 81cm, 2016 http://minyoung-choi.com/
michelle conway “Painting is my way of experiencing the world as it is. A still space to pay attention without the constant interruption of technology. How is technology altering our sense of place? Communal spaces are emptied to activate contemplation and uncover more complex feelings surrounding loss of human contact as technology advances. ” Michelle Conway (b 1968 NY) has been working in Ireland the past 26 years. Her studies include; Turps Banana Correspondence Course (2016-17), MFA Goldsmiths (Sept. 2012-Jan. 2013), BA Fine Arts First Class Honours (Centre for Creative Arts and Media, Ireland, 2011), BA Honours Advertising/ Minor Film and Television (Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University, US, 1990). Recent exhibitions include; Oriel Davies Open: Painting 2016/ Wales and the 134th Annual Exhibition Royal Ulster Academy 2015-16/ Belfast. She was longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize Exhibition 2016 and Anthology 2014/UK (curator Zavier Ellis/ Charlie Smith London). Other exhibitions include; Claremorris Open Exhibition (curator Chris Hammond/ MOT International), TULCA, RDS, Eigse (Ireland) and a solo exhibition at the Fulton Street Gallery, NY. Michelle was awarded ‘Paint Student of the Year’ and described by Irish Times art critic Aidan Dunne as “distinctly promising”. Her work has been published in Fresh Paint Magazine (Issue 9 2015), and Aesthetica Magazine (Issue 69 2016). She will be exhibiting in Art Bermondsey Project Space July 2016. “LittleLeague1”, oil on canvas stretched over board, 36 x 46cm, 2014 “LittleLeague3”, oil on canvas stretched over board, 36 x 46cm, 2015 http://michellejconway.com/
Daniel Crawshaw I am a landscape painter from Wales and have a specific interest in the ‘sublime’. My photo-based works are made from recollected experiences of remote mountain environments. I live in London and embrace a certain dynamic detachment from my subject matter. The walls of my Peckham studio provide a haven within a city environment where I create paintings of sparse hillsides. In an age dominated by screens and short attention spans I exploit the immediacy of photography by exploring the emotive energy that might reside in a painted image. Past and present converge in my work to reveal objects that might look instantly photographic yet perhaps hold something monumental and unattainable within their grasp. My process begins by walking extensively in the mountains and gathering images, sometimes simply on a camera phone. In my studio I work from selected 7x5 prints and avoid lists of component ‘features’ instead occupying simple pictorial spaces of geographical ambiguity. I work in a silent, meditative way, slowly returning to places in my mind and establishing painterly resolutions. I hope to awaken a sense of yearning through my paintings and viewers often insist they recognise locations or more importantly recall their own feelings of being in the mountains. Maybe the paintings simply offer clues or routes to an emotive past. Perhaps the paintings’ topographical uncertainties accentuate a familiar resonance and provoke a line of questioning that affirms an acceptance of the nebulous. “Cwm Dyli”, oil on canvas, 185 x 200cm, 2014 http://www.artwales.com/artists-detail-mtg-en.php?artistID=190 http://www.re-title.com/artists/daniel-crawshaw.asp
paul crook Paul studied BA(hons) Fine Art at Falmouth School of Art followed by an MA in Fine Art at Birmingham Polytechnic. His studio is based in Warwickshire, where he works as a fine artist/ painter and lecturer in Fine Art. His paintings have been exhibited widely, both in the UK and internationally. Recently he has been awarded two national art prizes and his work is included in a number of private collections. The paintings explore the geometrical shapes and structures that can be found within the fragments of the Post-Modernist utopian architectural urban and suburban environments. These built spaces resonate with the layered personal narratives of families and communities that have inhabited these places during our more recent cultural and social histories. The use of saturated vivid colour is employed to elevate these normally bland, overlooked and unpopulated locations to something that is both seductive and celebrated. These places offered a promising, beautiful and perfect future; a place for shelter, escape and happiness. My paintings attempt to explore what remains of this once youthful and optimistic new world. These paintings depict a generic Northern European urban landscape that we immediately recognize and identify. The intention is that the work should connect and resonate with an audience who like myself live within and are part of this continuously changing environment. The viewer is invited to observe a familiar placeless world that is separate yet yearning close to their own. “green library”, acrylic, 125 x 100cm, 2016 “northbound”, acrylic, 125 x 100cm, 2016 http://www.paul-crook.co.uk/
Eugenia Cuellar The paintings submitted are part of an ongoing series titled The dream of reason, which is mainly focused on landscape, the action on seeing and the link that is generated between you and the image in front of you, which is somehow transformed and perceived only partly. Absorbed in their thoughts practising an inverted yoga pose, or staring at something unknown, the characters in the compositions seem to be highly connected to their pleasant surroundings or, maybe, and at the same time, far from there and inaccessible. The natural environment acts as a kind of shell in which they seem to feel safe and, even, time seems to be static. In fact, it’s just a question of gaze, the term that Foucault introduced in his 1963 book The Birth of the Clinic. Though the French word ‘le regard’ poses difficulties for translation into English, It can mean glance, gaze, look but without the abstract connotations that the word has in French. Foucault uses the word to refer to the fact that it is not just the object of knowledge which is constructed but also the knower. And so, when seeing you are not only appreciating or apprehending what you see, but also yourself. And in this process of seeing, time does not move forward, but rather everything is ever present, spreading out in all directions, just as we see this space at the moment. “Ciel Brouillé”, oil on linen, 180 x 140cm, 2016 http://www.eugeniacuellar.com/
gordon dalton My recent paintings have a quiet melancholy that questions their intentions. A seemingly offhand approach reveals a love of awkward imagery, polluted colours and a stuttering bad grammar. An anxious contradiction is on show, with the work being selfconscious of what it is, the world around it, its possible failings, yet it revels in a new found simplicity and relationships to landscape painting, finding an intimate beauty in both natural and post-industrial landscape. The paintings reference South Wales, North East England, and Mid-West America, places I have lived and worked as well as indirectly quoting imagined places I have not yet, or am unlikely to visit. There is an aspiration on show, of the grass being greener on the other side, or of everything beautiful being far away. However, they are grounded in the here and now, the everyday activity of painting, of placing coloured mud on canvas with a hairy stick. My work asks the viewer to look longer and harder at what painting is, and why it continues to fascinate. “Backwoods Country Gothic�, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 120cm, 2016 http://llegallery.com/Gordon-Dalton http://www.gordondalton.co.uk/
lara davies The materials used in my work are deliberately minimal - a limited palette of oil on un-primed board. My landscapes are painted away from the subject, where the starting point of a painting is a digital image. I then make numerous studies of the same or similar image, where the photographic image is gradually disregarded and the paintings become about pattern and tone. A sense of being many times removed from a place is evident in the final painting, although I aim to retain the glowing quality associated with a digital image. The absence but reliance on an anonymous author of the initial image limits the amount of information that is translated to the viewer, allowing the viewer to construct their own narrative within my work. ‘Garden 4’ and ‘Foliage 1’ are both responses to the balance between the timelessness of the place – the garden – and the constant flux in nature. ‘Garden 4’ is part of a series where I took photos at different times of day, the changing position of the sun causing different patterns to form from the shadow cast by the garden fence. In ‘Foliage 1’ I was trying to make sense of the abundance of greenery growing at the back of the garden, which again although a permanent feature of the garden, looks different depending on the season and the time of day. “Garden 4”, oil on board, 25 x 25cm, 2016 “Foliage 1”, oil on board, 25 x 25cm, 2016 laradavies.com LLEgallery.com
Lisa Denyer My practice is grounded in the themes of place and time. Influences include ideas around modernity, escapism, and the transportive potential of paint. Although the abstract nature of the work renders its symbolism open to interpretation, the forms and colours which manifest reference every day observations from advertising, fashion, cinema, architecture, TV, the internet etc. My painting process is open to diversion as I aim to respond to inherent qualities of the medium, allowing the materiality of paint to direct my actions. The slowness of painting can provide an alternative to the sensory bombardment encountered in daily life, but it can also be about that. For me, the work acts as documentation of the time and place I find myself in. The viewer is invited to consider broad themes of the organic, the artificial, transience, entropy, and created worlds. Taking inspiration from traditional art forms such as shan shui, the organic aspect comes into play when thinking in terms of landscape. When I make paintings such as Floating Landscape or Deep Sea Diving, I imagine the scene extending, continuing outside the parameters of the painting. Notions of foreground and background, movement and structure are explored. The paintings also use framing devices to look more specifically at containment. In both pieces the architecturally inspired hard edges of geometric abstraction are contrasted with spontaneous brush strokes in reference to ideas around nature versus the man made. “Deep Sea Diving�, acrylic and emulsion on hardboard, 56 x 40cm, 2016 Floating Landscape, acrylic and emulsion on hardboard, 56 x 40cm, 2016 https://lisa-denyer.squarespace.com/
tom down Tom Down’s work riffs off of romanticized landscapes taken from varied origins such as paintings, film, television, illustration and advertising. Approached in a non-hierarchical fashion, these common motifs such as alpine vistas, desert valleys, snowbound landscapes and forest scenes are all re-trodden by the artist. Whilst the work revels in the these nostalgic ideals, it does not seek to simply replicate specific places, instead familiar images are composed to create archetypal scenes, blurring the boundaries between the found and the created, reality and fantasy. He creates spaces that are simultaneously familiar yet distant to the viewer. Stirring up memories of somewhere that cannot be quite placed in reality, he utilizes this as a comment on our own unrealistic expectations of these landscapes and that of the artifice of painting itself. “Fallow ground”, acrylic and gesso on board, 40 x 50cm, 2016 “Cave”, acrylic and gesso on board, 50 x 60cm, 2016 http://www.tomdown.co.uk/home
Heather Eastes The time just before memory and perhaps before pain must be the place I never wanted to leave. Myths and fairy tales, mother’s childhood books, old wooden painted toys seemed to contain this almost-/forgotten time. Working on small wooden panels I rediscover Arcadia, Eden, the place at the edge of memory - half-remembered seaside places where unknown babies, adults, animals played and merged. But even in this place I never wanted to leave, associations summon from earliest memories, the trauma of being ‘alone’ mortality, the strangeness of the ‘other’ (sibling, friend, parent, stranger), the longing for communion, possession, eternity. All is best probed, exploited, conquered through imagemaking, through the stain, the line. The most direct path to the subconscious ‘dream-time’. Wounds give birth to ‘familiars’ - transformed on bright wooden panels. They dance beyond mortality, observed by wise old Death’s head, crows and skulls, themselves, beyond death. www.axisweb.org/p/heathereastes “Leapers”, oil on wood, 22 x 17cm, 2016 www.axisweb.org/p/heathereastes
Andrew Ekins My paintings have mass and substance, employing a fugitive sculptural language to question an allusion between a geo-topographical landscape and a landscape of the human condition. There is an intended fusion of idea and substance, form and image to explore the psychological links we make, the sense of belonging to an idea of land and place. Like a sediment, these are paintings formed over time and bearing the marks of time in their appearance. In this instance a succession of paint skins (the “wrong” part that might normally be discarded as spent or worthless), are piled, stacked, manipulated, and repainted to shape an image of a crumpled, imperfect fleshy landscape. This form, stacked, sagging, misshapen, is intended to carry some of the narrative of the work: the weathered materiality of a body of land, and the inevitability of decline through maturation of the mortal human body. These paintings reconstruct memories of yearned for landscapes seen, combined with a fantasy of those not yet known, generating tropes for the connection I feel for rock, soil, and turf I have yet to tread, thoughts I have yet to think. “Far Away Land”, paint skins and oil paint on cushion, 52 x 58 x 58cms, 2014 “Fat of the Land”, paint skins, oil paint, fabric panel, paint tin, 60 x 72 x 32cms, 2013
Louise Giovanelli I have unstructured and chaotic ideas that are gradually distilled through the act of making, providing scope for ideas to mature, fall away and settle. I have no idea, nor desire to know prior to making - only faint ideas exist in raw forms. Although vague, this allows for the possibility that something will be created rather than illustrated. I am concerned with exploiting two opposing modes of painting; the static contemplative character resulting from animated, fluid decision-making. My work rejects ‘literalist’ art that pictures the actuality of experience, instead concerning how the materiality of painting can de-simplify experience. The imagery I use within my work is often deliberately naive. Objects and places that engender a sense of curiosity and innocence or nostalgia, and I mean this in its strict definition, the desire to create or return home. The submitted works - ‘Untitled (The Bed)’ and ‘Mirrored Histories’ explore this definition of nostalgia and subsequently the idea of longing for home. The paintings are intentionally ambiguous in terms of narrative as they blur reality and fiction. This leaves the viewer wondering if in fact the depicted place exists or whether it is just an idealised image. “Mirrored Histories”, oil on canvas, 96 x 158cm http://www.louisegiovanelli.com/
Gabriela Giroletti I have grown to become widely aware of the digital era that was born during my childhood and how it transformed the way images are seen: behind a backlit screen. Being interested in how things meet in space and looking back at the way technology has advanced, my paintings began to reference a world set by the computer, resonating many of the new visual conventions familiar to the Internet generation. The barriers between human spontaneity and the virtual world surround my work, where I make use of urban or natural landscapes as starting points for discussing high technology and its increasing intrusive quality in human relations. The construction of virtual spaces and the notion of humans becoming virtual beings are explored with attention to the importance of old conventions within the visual arts domain, proving its significance through oil painting as well as replicating my own human experience while converting my digital sketches into an analogue, historical language. “Yet another untitled�, oil on canvas, 100 x 80cm, 2016 http://www.gabrielagiroletti.com
penny hallas The place we never wanted to leave is already in the past, is the place we had to leave, in spite of ourselves. When we look back at that space we can no longer find ourselves there, all we can find are remainders, memories shaped like us, or imprinted with the shape of our loss. These paintings use the commonplace metaphor of clothes to explore this familiar condition, imagining them as traces retaining something of the shape and energy of past existences, past moments, including those special places and times which seemed to fit us so well. Like dreams and like memories, they are both here and elsewhere, both full and empty, summoning up a time and a place whose only reality persists in the texture, shape and colour of its remains. The garments evoke history in general as well as histories in particular, both of which they would have played a part in characterising and defining. History flows through them, vaguely, by means of connective pipes, wires and systemic processes whose origins and ends may be unclear. But history may also make its presence felt by less systemic means, in other words by violent penetrations and piercings, dislocations and effacements. Looking back at the place or the time we never wanted to leave, we realise to what extent it was already in process, in conversation or in a state of struggle with realities outside its own frame of reference. “Address Undressed Triptych 2�, oil on board, 3 x panel 61 x 81cm, 2015 www.pennyhallas.co.uk
sky kim A series of abstract painting/drawing that captures the vital energy of all living beings through microscopic scanning. My meticulous, labor-intensive watercolor paintings/drawings are at once abstract, anatomical, spiritual and sensual. There’s a constant tug of war embedded in the organic undulations in my work. The shapes are comforting, yet dizzying; fluid, yet stagnant; organic, yet abstract; delicate, yet obsessive. My inspiration comes from my philosophical belief in “reincarnation.” I realized that through numerous lives, we complete our life cycle and become spiritually advanced. This realization influenced my work a great deal. I began to use the repetition of circles and wiggly lines to create patterns that represent the wheel of life—the reincarnation. A circle is an absolute form you can find in nature. Each circle in my work contains energy which allows a being to consistently evolve into a complete form of nature. When you draw a circle, there is no beginning or end. You always come back to the point where you started, just like our life process, the principle of Yin and Yang. Our ability to see and hear depends upon our detection of energy traveling at different wavelengths of vibration. I simply capture these patterns of energy, the residue of my vibration in my work. Although we define our self as solid, we are made of trillions of cells, gallons of water and ultimately everything about us exists in a constant and dynamic state of activity and movement in the name of evolving process. “Untitled”, watercolor on paper, 107 x 228cm, 2014 http://www.skykim.net/
Ilona Kiss Ilona Kiss is a Swiss artist who lives and works in Manchester. Her work includes drawing, painting and collage. Her work is mainly influenced by dreams, nightmares and the question of place and belonging. It is drawn to the ambiguity and seems to create a tension between the familiar and the strange like a wrestle between the real and the imaginary. She is interested in those times of the day, when things shift, the transition between dreaming and waking, when memories are scrambled up and mix weirdly with imagination. A sense of adventure and the poetic quality of uncertain situations have left their mark and influence her work as such. The darker side of own and collective experiences is explored through juxtapositions connecting with more traditional genres. Darkness, loneliness and a sense of sadness surface through her work and let the viewer encounter some kind of other-worldliness. She develops her paintings and drawings using her own and found images. The whole process of collecting photographic material, looking through them, making selections and connecting the un-connectable is a major part of her work. She uses the computer to transform the selected images into digital montages, playing with layers and colours. It is a transformational process altogether, from choosing the images to the final painting or drawing, yet she always looks for painterly qualities within the photographic material. To her, images of all kinds are sources of inspiration, but she is particularly drawn to the cinematographic, to fairy tales and the sublime. It is the dreamlike scenario that is the driving force in her art. “Deaf On One Eye”, 55 x 46cm, 2016 “Fairy Pond”, 122 x 122cm, 2016 www.ilonakiss.com
Arron Kuiper Pystyll Rhaeadr is a local waterfall I have been visiting since I was a child and is a place that (like a lot of Welsh countryside) is straight out of a fairy tale. Needless to say it has a lasting hold upon me yet in many attempts and mediums I have failed to capture it as it sits in my mind. This is my first attempt at it in my own medium I call Gel. Gel consists of oil paint injected into a transparent gel with a syringe, like a sculptural painting. This allows me to work with not only colour, but texture to. As it is free from surface and has the added dimension it allows me to more fully realise a place or an object without normal sculptural or painterly constraints. It is like being able to leave brush strokes in mid-air and enables the viewer to engage with a painterly environment and to ‘touch’ the pigment with their eyes. I call the space inside the box my ‘infinite fun space’ because inside it anything is possible. As I have wanted to combine a sense of my childhood memory with the actuality of the site I have employed a number of little tricks like different textures, forced perspective and bold colours to communicate a sense of the place I carry with me and that which I experience each time I return. Arron graduated Cardiff School of Art and Design in 2011 and achieved an A.N. magazine front cover and London prize in the same year. He continued to exhibit in group shows until his first solo exhibition at The Alchemists Gallery in 2014. Then it was more group shows and projects until he moved back up to North Wales earlier this year to begin his practice there. Though he paints and draws his main focus is on the continued development and refinement of the sculptural painting technique though presently he would say he is “just trying to make a living to be honest”. “Pistyll Rhaeadr”, Sculptural Painting (Gel), 36 x 25 x 15 http://www.axisweb.org/p/arronkuiper/
Paraic Leahy “ In the Imagination of storytelling for a very long time, mirrors thus act as instruments of taming, of dominion, of forcing a recognition that alters the beholders’ nature; there reflections in the glass has a magical effect, it tames and civilizes its subjects’” Recurring interests in ‘beauty and the absurd’, Themes of incompleteness or isolation, social order or aesthetics. The imagery that emerges from these collaborations is intended to be beautiful and morbid, sublime and singular. They act as icons or host to connect the interior and exterior worlds of the artist. I feel both works tie in to the title ‘ This must be the place I never want to leave’. The works act on a 3 dimensional level. The under drawing with pencil, the painted shaped surface and the oil work that sprawls out onto the surface of the wood. The result is to alter the perception of space within the landscape and the figure on a black surface. The aim of the work produced is to use the ideas of ‘collage’ to separate areas of interest. Isolated forms hinting at the ‘creature’ on sparse surfaces. Landscapes that take up the painted surface and floral patterns that leak out onto the exposed wood. Interest in the history of the mirror, the double, silhouettes and shadows all play the huge aspect in the working ideas. “Escaped Ones Eyes”, oil on wood, 42 x 50cm, 2016 “It Sticks Horribly And The Pattern Just enjoys It”,oil on wood, 42 x 50cm, 2016 http://paraicleahy.com/
Susanna Lisle This painting is a part of a series of work I am making to draw upon the experience and visual richness of a familiar loved place and at the same time locate and reconstruct it in a subtle but more permanent reality - one held in the mind. Mathematical pattern, Islamic pattern and geometry, act as a metaphor for my experience of the world. They reflect and evoke the rhythm and mystery of a particular loved landscape; its tangibility and elusiveness recalled over and over again in layers of visual language. ‘The book (of nature) is written in mathematical language...’ Galileo said. In my work I think of these two systems breathing together: the form, colour and texture of the landscape playing and morphing with geometrical pattern and space to re-create an experience. “Inglescombe”, oil on canvas, 91 x 117cm, 2016 http://www.susannalisle.com/
Catrin Llywd The works examine the vernacular culture of America, exploring the industrial landscape, the unseen, the everyday and the mundane. The paintings are drawn from pre-existing imagery, including photographs and video stills, as well as found imagery. Through this process, I create a distance between myself and the subject, where I am able to introduce my own reality. I recreate a location, a memory and a story, based on a place that I have never visited. All paintings appear to be empty with the obvious absence of people. The paintings present journeys yet to be taken, encouraging viewers to ponder within the unsettling narrative. Through the process of filtering the original concept, I remove the narrative, furthering the image from the original context, allowing for new interpretations to emerge. “House”, oil on panel, 31 x 28 cm, 2016 “Pool”, oil on panel, 30 x 43 cm, 2016 http://cargocollective.com/catrinllwyd
Jaya Mansberger The paintings I am currently making explore, amongst other things, the ambiguous and often fluid juncture between abstraction and representation. Hovering on the threshold of figuration, the brush-strokes teeter between signalling some form of landscape or celestial body and dissolving into more purely abstract passages. The works draw on both art historical tradition and painterly technique and are done on a modest scale with a sensitive, intuitive feel for colour and mark-making so that they are not definitive or bombastic, but maintain a sense of open-endedness and mystery. Though the small size, subtle tones and gentle paint application of my recent paintings gives them a veneer of delicacy, there is often also something more direct and urgent which underpins them. Both fragile and forceful, spontaneous and highly considered, the paintings contain a certain tension. They depict different states of being and different kinds of spaces that operate both visually and emotionally. Painting for me is in some ways an attempt to create and access a rarefied sensual experience and intense otherworldly atmosphere. Works such as Mystic River are as much about painting as a form of Romantic escape or transcendence as they are about a wish to evoke and inhabit a more elegant and pure place or existence, one which half recalls, but is not tied down by, objective reality. “Mystic River�, watercolour on paper, 42 x 30cm, 2015 http://www.jayamansberger.co.uk/
Enzo Marra I have been occupied with the artworld, the processes and activities that occur behind the privacy of studio doors, the hanging and display of works in the gallery, the milling of observers in gallery spaces, the way that their presence then gives life and purpose to the works on display. I feel that my submitted images of Ai WeiWei seen in his studio, exert a feel of the safety and necessary privacy that only a studio will provide. The one place an artist never wishes to leave, their creativity contained and protected from prying eyes. The processes that occur within the sympathetic walls, a secretive pursuit until the artist is willing to share their fragile existence. The studio, the sole quiet reflective space left to the artist in a world now dominated by social media and anticipations of meteoric fame. “ai wei wei 1”, oil on canvas, 31 x 41cm, 2015 “ai wei wei (yellow and green)”, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 42cm http://newbloodart.com/artist/2599/enzo-marra
Mary McCrae McCrae’s practice explores the landscape of female genitalia and how it has been defined as a docile, sexualised and submissive object. Through her paintings she reclaims the territory of the female sex from sexist views. Language and visual language is important to McCrae, she questions how the most ‘immoral’ word, ‘Cunt’ is an unwanted and unseen word; which in turn makes the vagina unseen. In rejection of society’s ‘take’ on this word ‘cunt’ she refers to it, lovingly as ‘cunt’. Using this terminology, McCrae aims to break down the taboo of the Cunt. Painting is McCrae’s way of communicating. She uses the paint as an extension of herself. The viciousness of paint pushes her thirst for more descriptive power with her marks. Her paintings intimate gynaecological landscapes which are in celebration of function. Her layers of collaged acrylic, oil, varnish and gloss paint develop a depth conveying a symbolic version of reality. McCrae’s celebration of Cunt reveals women’s power. “Deep Lobes”, oil and gloss on canvas, 23.5 x 39”, 2016 http://newbloodart.com/artist/2599/enzo-marra
Anna McNeil My paintings explore the limits between abstraction and representation to investigate how we form perceptions. I am fascinated by how our constantly changing points of view affect how we interpret both the painted imagery and our own experience, which in turn forms our identity. I aim to investigate visual relationships in my work, sometimes leaving representational suggestions or playing with abstractions unfolding through the process of making the work. Through allowing an ambiguity in the visual interpretation of my paintings, I am interested in reflecting how our perception and our memory are dynamic and creative processes and how meaning, in a representational sense, is constantly manipulated by contemporary perspectives. Themes evoked by my paintings include intimacy, unity and isolation in human relationships. “Memento WR”, oil on canvas, 70 x 50 cm, 2016 “Alight”, oil on paper, 45 x 32cm, 2014 http://www.annamcneil.com/
Liam O’Connor The portrait is the focus of my practice – the portraits I am submitting are the product of trying to dissect what has drawn me to the portrait. Breaking the portrait down over the years the form has become malleable. As a fine artist and a portrait painter the parts of the portrait: medium, sitter, place, prop and backdrop have become interchangeable and fluid. The painted portrait is still core but the result is unexpected. The painted backdrop has come to the foreground veiling creating a space in the paint and sometimes replacing/becoming the portrait. “Eira”, oil-on-zinc, 40 x 30cm, 2016 liamoconnor.net llegallery.com
alan rees-baynes Everything I undertake is determined by words. In these two paintings the words are descriptions of household paints, and the six shades that make up the test card are my palette. Once I have decided on the specific colour name, I select a visual that relates to those words. Both paintings that I have chosen remind me of ‘places I never wanted to leave.’ Amazon Jungle A jungle is a highly abstract and complex environment, both visually and as an ecosystem in nature. So I enjoyed the challenge of recreating the foliage and intense crowding for light that occupies each daily existence in the Amazon jungle. With the continued rise of deforestation of these majestic spaces, it felt even more poignant trying to represent something so natural with the unnatural material of a household chemical paint. Nomadic Glow Nomadic Glow was based on a photograph that was taken by a friend who was living with a nomadic family in Mongolia. I first saw it on Facebook and the words of this colour just fitted. The fact that the original image was slightly formal as they posed for the photograph just enhanced how proud the family were of their heritage and choice of nomadic life. They have no facial features as this represents their glow at the lack of trappings that we endure on a daily basis; such as mortgages, taxes ect. “Amazon Jungle”, household paint on M.D.F., 122 x 122cm, 2015 “Nomadic Glow”, household paint on M.D.F., 122 x 122cm 2015 http://alanreesbaynes.co.uk/
Andre Stitt I have recently been investigating how painting can be experienced as ‘extended’ practice through installed groups and configurations. The current focus of this work is an exploration of modernist architectural legacies as the utopian embodiment of a modernist vision for civic, municipal and social progress. The work draws upon the materiality of the built environment and its abstract displacement through art as a memory of forms reimagined as a parallel universe. In proposing a simulacrum I wish to question our received notion of authenticity in a world constructed through imperial economies of power that contribute to national/cultural/post-colonial identity made manifest through art and architecture. The ambition is for work that may create a sense of recognition counterbalanced by a sense of timelessness, loss, longing, disconnection and melancholy. In so doing I wish to make paintings that seem to arrive as if from another time and place; a potential dissident space where all era’s co-exist. Paint is utilised as a synthetic transmitter of experience that reflects the historical uncertainty of time and place; proposing contemporary genre painting as a transformative medium with redemptive potential. As such, I see my painting occupying a liminal space. A position that is not static or fixed but part of a network that might be defined as ambiguous or ‘atemporal’ abstraction. I position my own painting here where it can be produced without an agenda based on a received meaning of a style. “Post-Capitalist Wall Relief for a Networkers Canteen in a Parallel Universe”, oil, enamel and formica on wood panel, 75 x 75cm, 2016 “Ree-Morton Generic Wall Panel for Case Study House in a Parallel Universe”, oil, enamel and formica on wood panel, 50 x 50cm, 2016
www.andrestitt.com
Eifion Sven-Myer Eifion Sven-Myer’s work concerns making and re-working artefacts in both 2 and 3 dimensions, effectively regurgitating them to create new visual amalgamations. He approaches this working method from a painter’s perspective and his newest artwork has partly been inspired by the form of medieval triptychs -with their painted openable doors. He has decided to incorporate -into areas of the interior painting- photographs of sections of a previous installation recently made in Oriel Davies. In the exterior painting Sven-Myer has painted himself as a lone figure in an abstracted landscape, which opens up to reveal the interior part of the polyptych as a vibrant blue scene where content yet ghostly figures inhabit a nebulous space of brush marks, echoes of deconstructed canvases and footpaths of congealed paint. Sven-Myer has attempted to create a dense swirling scene -intentionally womblike in essence- expressed in a calming blue. The suggestion is that the creative act may be a desire to hark back to foetal security, or at least childhood innocence. By constantly reforming previous creations Sven-Myer’s aim is to fabricate his own visual language and mental space for himself and for viewers to enter into. They are invited to interact with the piece by moving the various panels to dynamically alter the vistas. Eifion Sven-Myer is a Welsh artist living in Swansea where he has a studio with Elysium on the High Street. He has done residencies abroad as well as in Wales including in Elysium, Oriel Davies, g39 and Swansea College of Art. He graduated from UWTSD Swansea College of Art with a BA in Fine Art with FirstClass Honours. “Figures in a Regurgitated Landscape”, mixed media The artwork has panels on hinges, dimensions of the work: When Closed: 119 x 81 x 3.5cm When Open: 119 x 162 x 3.5cm www.eifionsvenmyer.com
Mircea Teleaga I have never been in the place that I am painting. I miss something that has never happened in ‘real’ life. A sublime moment when you gain access to the deep pool of sadness and melancholia inside. How do you show other people this place where you yourself have never been, but long desperately for? It is like missing something that has never happened. I am still looking for this place that I never want to leave, and I think that I will never find it. I hope that I will never find it. I am probably depending on it. It is this lacking, this missing, this sense of loss that drives me. It is a sense of awe in the face of a landscape that I have never seen. Or it is a landscape that sums up everything that has left a mark on me. A kind of condensed and compressed landscape. All that I know and understand and label as reality. Every time my paintings get close to a very figurative image of a particular place I feel very disappointed and I distort them in frustration. I have come to realize that such is the nature of memory. Let alone the nature of a memory that I have not experienced. One cannot recreate or relive it. Every attempt is a failure. The only thing that can be done is to harness the desire to do it. “Mention this to me. Watch the weather change”, oil on linen, 170 x 200 cm, 2016 http://www.mirceateleaga.com/
Christopher Twigg Are you in line, are you in time was made before, during and after dawn in my studio in Talgarth on May 18th, 2016. Insomnia, coffee, the first jackdaws, mist over Mynydd Troed. Vermilion and emerald green came together and drew apart (separated). I started from the corners and worked inwards which is why the centre is empty. I wanted to balance comfort and anxiety in a faded tapestry of rosy lips, cheeks, young leaves, turds and her immense body. The future a faded song: are you in line, are you in time I heard the painting’s title as I was finishing - without question marks - it was just sounds - making me feel uneasy, a trespasser, What right had I to be there? “Are you in line, are you in time”, 60 x 70cm, 2016 www.facebook.com/christophertwiggpaintings
Richard Twose These paintings were based on the Homer’s Odyssey as it was being imagined by The Mark Bruce Company. I spent several days drawing the dancers during rehearsals. The paintings that arose out of these sessions explored ideas of loss and longing and helplessness for Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, who waits at home and the eventual emotional reunion as Odysseus returns. “Waiting”, oil, 50 x 61cm “The Homecoming”, oil, 62 x 84cm http://www.richardtwose.co.uk/
Francisco Valdes Caudal is one of a series of paintings made using a similar process. One very evident feature is that they express two very different logics: one is that of the “low quality” photo images in which they are based, and the other is that of the informal/ abstract mess of paint that the viewer is able to see when getting close to them. The distance between these two logics is stretched to the maximum. Apart from this recognizable feature, what is the relevance of these paintings? Their most important quality is that they project themselves into space; the paint –accumulated in layers of material that actually stick out of the flat surface of the canvas— leaves the support as if it was attracted to the viewer’s eyes. The accumulation of images precipitates the extensions to the sides. As a result, the surface doesn’t seem to be able to support the accumulation of paint anymore; when looking at these paintings, it gives you the feeling that only your gaze is supporting the weight of the paint. If you blink, the image would deluge. There is a reversal of positions as a result of this effect of the paint withdrawing from the canvas; a system of reflections that leaves the viewer in the place of the canvas, while not being able to recognize anything else than the accumulation of colors. The viewer needs to go backwards, move away from the painting, in order to regain the image that was lost, and in doing so activates a playful paradox: the image is lost because of the excess of its own visibility. “Caudal II”, oil and spray paint on canvas, 170 x 379cm, 2016 www.franciscovaldes.co.uk
Lois Wallace My work explores reality and illusion through figurative painting. Peopled only by absence, I am interested in depicting psychological landscapes that explore what is ‘beyond us’ and how we can interpret the indeterminate. The visual counterparts of light and dark, movement and stillness, presence and absence, echo our attachment and detachment to the world around us. The shimmering twilight evokes human subjects without picturing them. The meditative act of painting, and the creation of a magical world, acts as a metaphor for today’s globally competitive society, where we are bombarded with media saturated images of perfection and aspiration. The punctured reality of thwarted desires is reflected in the isolation of the image and the trace of the landscape. Drawn from personal experiences, the paintings are derived from drawings and photographs made in the landscape. While there is a strong photographic element to the work, they are not depictions of the photographs, but evolve through a process of assimilation. These small, idyllic scenes depict our isolation in the modern world, beautiful but at the same time unsettling. The paintings explore solitude, vulnerability, expectations, dreams and the solace of beauty. “Always the summer”, 16 x 14cm “Secretplace”, 31 x 30cm http://www.loiswallace.co.uk/
tim warren ‘These paintings explore how memory of a place changes & alters over time, becoming linked to emotion, taste, smell and turning into an idealized memory that encompasses the whole sensory system. The resultant painting is a kind of universal symbol for a landscape that transcends the individual experience and resonates as a shared memory and experience.’ “I Have A Place In Mind”, oil on canvas, 150 x 150cm, 2016 “Estate”, oil on canvas, 150 x 150cm, 2016
ian watson My submitted works address the theme ‘This must be the place I never wanted to leave’ in that place and nostalgia are embedded in them. Each of the submitted paintings started out as an automatic work, taking shape over time and becoming imbued with personal signifiers towards incidents, times, materials and places that are imbued with a sense of ‘hiraeth’. These might be a cross between lily ponds at Bosherston and the half remembered scent of huge yellow flowers growing at the edge of the land where my father managed an orchard. There are the Garbage Pail Kids bought at the local corner shop married to a Francis Bacon retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in 1998. There is the return to familiarity in strange, new places. In particular the video rental shop on Richmond Road, Cardiff that became home from home to a young art student in a new city. A ‘place’ in this sense becomes internalised and each painting is a collection of the places I love and miss, as well as new ones that in turn take their place. The Portrait-style orientation of these characters and spaces are intentional and serve to represent the collection of memory and influence of spaces on our intellectual development. “Trap Country Standard”, oil on canvas, 80 x 65cm, 2014 “Space Mountain”, oil on canvas, 51 x 51cm, 2014 www.uhohwatson.com
laura welsman Laura visualises subjective, sensory realities in relation to their wider social environment. Her works utilise installation and paint to challenge how space and colour are perceived in order to induce self-analysis and experiences of the sublime. Her painting installations are often stimulated by the free association of personal historic events, recurring psychological abstractions and correlating symbolic objects. The negative space in between the works, as with the objects within the paintings, create a stage for the viewer to inhabit and experience aesthetic tensions. Research on immersive works and religious sublimity led to the creation of subjective utopias –painting has offered the artist a means of developing an ongoing folk narrative based on books full of personal and experiential notes. “Gate�, oil on canvas, 76 x 76cm, 2014 https://laura-welsman.squarespace.com
fran williams The artists’ work is in essence an ongoing obsession with the language of mark making and the application of paint, what narratives it can suggest and the feelings it can evoke in the viewing of it. The Moulding Of The Clay is a moment in time, dusk...this is a recurring theme in Fran’s work, the time of day she feels has most weight to it, the end of whatever that day has brought about and an entrance into the night. The blurred horizon line could be anywhere...the journey of the viewer is ongoing, self-realisation through time brings you home to yourself. Since graduating Fran has exhibited extensively including London, Edinburgh, Bristol and Swansea. Her work has a keen collector base both in the UK and overseas. “The Road Less Travelled”, oil/acrylic on wood, 60 x 30cm, 2016 www.franwilliams.org
richard williams These two pieces are my interpretation of a sort of candyfication of nature. I wanted to see what this sort of sweet, edible world of foliage would be like. Part of an ongoing project. I’m a Swansea-based artist and generally work in Acrylic or pencil + charcoal. Lately into nature that has been touched by mild surrealism. Love beauty + love horror. Believe purely visual art is best when not explained via other means, or perhaps not over-explained. Can’t recreate what is in my head so I allow whatever techniques my dodgy, RSI-ridden arms come up with to dictate what will happen. Yet still I hope to one day have 30 ft tall holograms in my image permamently beamed into the squares of several minor cities. “Edible bush”, acrylic, 46 x 61cm, 2015 “Victor and spoils”, acrylic, 46 x 61cm, 2015
camilla wilson These paintings, part of a long series, explore the representation, reading and inhabitation of architectural space. They seek to embody both the desire for an interior space and the negotiation of a representational language appropriate to it. Architecture is reconfigured through the process of painting; what is seen is selective. The emphasis through painting is upon the sense of inhabiting: inhabiting the space, or inhabiting the image as a space. In these paintings the relationship between intimacy and estrangement is elaborated through spatial devices and interference: traces of previous views, projections, and the interference of colour both to articulate and disrupt space. Sometimes, the paintings work to delay recognition on the part of a viewer. Sometimes, the places represented appear obsolete, unbound by function, de-familiarised, and free to take on a dreamlike quality, as forms of ruin. Like a dream space, eliding boundaries of real and unreal, the work suggests that inhabiting an interior is more a psychological than physiological state. “Wands”, oil on canvas, 40.5 x 30.5cm, 2014 “Rabbits”, oil on canvas, 40.5 x 30.5cm, 2015 http://www.re-title.com/artists/camilla-wilson.asp
Tong zhang What is the emptiness between physical objects about? Is it really existing or just mentally created inside of mind? If the space exists, how to reach the moment of emptiness? I always have a strong feeling that part of world has opened to me, but I never realize they existed. It is an experience that makes me step outside of lived daily life creating a moment that is both emptiness and awareness. The moment of emptiness is flowing between the physical objects. It is so uncertain that I have to find a way to approach the surface of the mystery. The moment of awareness transforms phenomena into mental energy, in which the normal ways of behaving, rules, laws no longer apply. Lived experience has been shifted to an awareness that the familiar part is disappearing and unknowing is left. I am defined by moments. They invoke a sense of sublimity, yet they are situated in the context of a physical and mundane experience. They are like a mysterious energy flowing around me, which makes my ordinary life full of potential of being sublime and opens a new way of looking that triggers a sense of curiosity and wonderment to the real-life. The daily world to me is saturated with affects, sometimes it might be sufficient to isolate motifs in the everyday that are so basic that they capture the reality of basic emotions. I’m curious what has happened and what I was missing at the moments because I believe there is always a space of realizing the emotional potential. “Landscape II”, watercolour on paper, 100 x 100cm, 2015 “Landscape III”, watercolour on paper, 100 x 100 cm, 2015 www.zhangtong2015.wix.com
beep venues 2016 elysiumgallery, 16 College Street, Swansea, SA1 5BH Swansea College of Art, Dynevor Campus, De-La Beche Street, Swansea, SA1 3EU ARCADECARDIFF, UNIT 3b, Queens Arcade, Queen Street, Cardiff, CF10 2BY
Undegun, Regent Street, Wrexham, LL11 1SG