Meri Wells - The Wakelin Purchase Award

Meri Wells - The Wakelin Purchase Prize winner 2011

This year's recipient of The Wakelin Purchase Award is the mid-Wales sculptor, Meri Wells. The award allows a selection of work by a Wales based artist to be bought for the Glynn Vivian Gallery permanent collection in Swansea. The selector for 2011 was Andrew Green from the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.

Meri Wells lives and works near Machynlleth and has been quietly making her extraordinary, ceramic, anthropomorphic creatures for many years. I remember seeing a show of her work in The Tabernacle in Machynlleth some while ago which exhibited some of the larger scale pieces she makes, including strange characters from the Mari Lwyd folk tradition.

Meri Wells 

The creatures she makes are uncanny, archetypal and perhaps slightly mournful. They strike a deep chord and their earthy, salt-glazed finishes make them seem to be from the most fundamental part of our psyche. Liminal beings half-in and half-out of the mythical and the imagined. For me her work has a very powerful quality, an otherworldliness that somehow imbues these sculptures with a supernatural presence. I feel very pleased that she has received this recognition for her work and hope to see more in exhibitions and collections in the future.

Meri Wells

Laura Ford - Beast and Other Works

Laura Ford - Beast & Espalier Girl - seen here

The Glynn Vivian Gallery in Swansea is currently showing Beast a work which has been purchased for the permanent collection from sculptor, Laura Ford. The piece is on show in the foyer along with a brand new work called Mummers (2011) and Espalier Girl (2006) until 4 September

Beast was shown as part of the Venice Biennale in 2005 and again in 2006 at Glynn Vivian Gallery as part of the Contemporary Sculpture series, it has been a very popular work with audiences which has led the gallery to include it in the permanent collection. 

In recent years Ford has used textiles to make strange and uncanny figures, often life size, they have a familiar tactile quality whilst also carrying a sense of impending menace. They have the unsettling qualities of '...a bad dream or a spooky story...' and invite the viewer to concoct imaginary narratives. Beast sits bulkily on a too-small stool, he is made of sack cloth, undeniably human but with suggestions of animal features - a tail, a possible beak. It feels like he may be incarcerated...a prison, a military establishment, a secure hospital? He asks us questions about the projections we use to unburden our own sense of psychological discomfort. 

Mummers is another extraordinary and truly 'uncanny' work, life size figures of boys engaged in some kind of school boy game suggest at first a playground scenario - it becomes clear however that one of the characters is lying prostrate on the ground surrounded by his peers - one of whom is holding an iron rod. All the figures wear a shaggy costume of fabric strips reminiscent of a 'Mummers' play, a traditional folk performance usually enacted ritually each year which acts out a story of the death of a mythical king. The figures have a extraordinary sense of suspended life, it is a tableaux that is frozen at a moment of horrible realisation and touches on issues about the moral boundaries of children which are exceptionally disturbing.

Upstairs in the main gallery space is an exhibition of three international film works which examine themes of love in particular cultural contexts. I Know Something About Love part II features work by Yang Fudong (China), Shirin Neshat (Iran) and Christodoulos Panayiotou (Cyprus). The themes of the show seem to mark something of a refreshing change of focus and curation - an investigation of this most unstable and powerful of states and the cultural restraints that define its unfolding.

Jonathan Anderson at Glynn Vivian Gallery

I visited Jonathan Anderson's Wakelin Purchase Prize work again whilst I was in the Glynn Vivian Gallery - and this gives me an excuse to feature this excellent photograph of the work taken by Ken Dickinson.

Jonathan Anderson - Richard and Rosemary Wakelin Purchase Award

Oriel Myrddin Gallery's Gallery Manager, Meg Anthony, has been the selector for this year's Richard and Rosemary Wakelin Purchase Award for The Glynn Vivian Gallery in Swansea, awarded this year to Swansea-based artist Jonathan Anderson.

This annual award is given to a Welsh artist whose work is purchased for the Gallery’s permanent collection. Meg selected three small-scale sculptures from the artist’s recent ‘house’ series [Concrete House (2009), Concrete House with Coal Seam (2010) and Sand House Mould (2006-8)] which she describes as: "...poetic and profoundly moving, as the house form draws us close to the artist’s psyche as well as questioning (dis)harmony on a social and political level."

Jonathan Anderson - seen here

There are a series of wall based works on show in the upper galleries along with the purchased works including one of my favourite pieces which uses wallpaper, coal dust and driftwood. The show continues until Sunday 20 June 2010.

Ralph Turner - Crafts curator

Ralph Turner talking about Collecting a Kaleidoscope curated from the The Crafts Council Collection

The Glynn Vivian Gallery in Swansea has a small space which is used to show exhibitions of craft and design objects, the shows are curated by Ralph Turner. A former exhibitions Officer for The Crafts Council, Ralph Turner is renowned as a curator, writer and craft critic. Quiet and understated, these shows are exquisite little gems showing important and significant makers.

The current exhibition is called Sitting Pretty and features chairs as design objects.

Mario Botta - Seconda Chair 1982 - photo Louise Bird

The gallery says: A well designed chair can bring a sculptural element to any room and, as this exhibition shows, there are a number of ways of achieving this. Starting in the early 20th Century with the revolutionary work of Gerrit Rietveld and Alvar Aalto, the exhibition includes later examples of Italian design from the 1950s & 60s by Giancarlo Piretti and Anna Castelli Ferrieri.

Swiss architect, Mario Botta is represented with structured work from the 1980s, alongside Britain's Richard La Trobe-Batemen and Fred Baier. More recently, BarberOsgerby's successful London practice covers a wide range of products, as does Jasper Morrison, whose cool handling of aesthetics has established his global reputation.

Alongside Rietveld, there are four more contemporary Dutch contributors to the show with individual approaches to furniture: Ruud-Jan Kokke, Tejo Remy, Erik de Graaff, and Tord Boontje. In Britain, Jim Partridge and Edward Teasdale both work with wood, whilst Joe Wentworth, the youngest maker in this exhibition, produces unexpected designs such as cement stools, demonstrating that experiments with unorthodox materials can pay off. Seen here

Peter Finnemore - Glynn Vivian Gallery

Peter Finnemore - Birdwatcher - seen here

There is a show of recent acquisitions from Carmarthenshire artist, Peter Finnemore in Room 1 at the Glynn Vivian in Swansea. Birdwatcher is an installed film piece shown on five LED mini screens and they are also showing a series of projected short films.

A great bit of curation by the gallery, this show works in subtle tandem with the main exhibition, Willie Doherty's Buried, whilst also bringing a lightness of touch to difficult subject matter.

Willie Doherty - Buried

Willie Doherty - Buried - seen here

We spent Saturday in Swansea and made a visit to see the Willie Doherty exhibition at the Glynn Vivian Gallery. The show hosted the two video pieces Ghost Story (2007), first shown at the 52nd Venice Biennale, and Buried (2009), commissioned by and first shown at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh.

The work is relentlessly dark touching as it does on the artist's own experiences of the The Troubles in Northern Ireland and in particular his witnessing of Bloody Sunday from the window of his family home aged 12.

"Buried is a show about landscape and memory, about repression and resurgence and the difficulties inherent in representing contested and bitterly painful events in a post-conflict situation. It steps away from the simple accretion of historical events or factual detail, instead pursuing oblique and poetic routes toward a truth, not of the grand sweep of history but the intimate and painful price it exacts on the individual psyche." seen here

Both films are deeply effecting. Buried was made as a companion to Ghost Story and seems to focus the intensity of the events alluded to in Ghost Story. The high quality of the film making lends it an exquisite depth and clarity. It is beautiful and poetic, and at the same time dank and scrubby. There is a supernatural resonance in the aesthetic, a sense of expectation and narrative tension which is not, ultimately satisfied. The glimpses of detritus and residue within the wooded space we witness are ambiguously horrific.

Here is an excellent review of the show.

Willie Doherty - Buried

Willie Doherty - Still from Buried - seen here

As soon as the snow has melted and I can travel again I'm heading off to Glynn Vivian Gallery in Swansea to see their latest show Buried by Willie Doherty. Irish artist, Doherty is showing a selection of films and photographs including a new film Buried, made and shown in context with an earlier film, Ghost Story.

Doherty has made work throughout his career that address The Troubles in Northern Ireland with particular reference to his witnessing of Bloody Sunday in 1972.

"...Doherty's focus on place, on the landscape which can no longer contain its histories and memories, avoids simple resolutions, acknowledging instead that long histories never die. In Doherty's work, the past is buried but ever present. Doherty's work blends fact and fiction, history and memory, and has an odd sense of timeless urgency - that these are concerns affecting us all, issues that will not go away." seen here

Ceramic Collection at Glynn Vivian Gallery

C. 1814 Transfer design by James Brindley.

Whilst at the Glynn Vivian in Swansea, I had a proper look at the porcelain and Swansea china collection. There are some beautiful and lively historical pieces, really charming. Not much in the way of contemporary work, which is a shame, there's some fantastic makers working in Wales at the moment. However, the collections at Aberystwyth Arts Centre and the National Museum in Cardiff perhaps serve that function.

Tim Davies, Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Tim Davies - Figures in a Landscape

I was pleased to get down to Swansea to see Tim Davies' new show, Between a Rock and a Hard Place at the Glynn Vivian Gallery on Saturday. I enjoyed it more than I expected to. I've always liked Davies' work but I sometimes feel a little suffocated by the political content. This new work was nicely balanced; the political was integrally present but not overbearing. What I actually like most about Davies' work is the process, the meticulous repetition and the materiality, and this show did not disappoint. Throughout the exhibition, he uses postcards as the basis for the work. The foyer was particularly impressive showing the ongoing Figures in a Landscape 2004-08 series of tourist postcards their figures, often in local or 'national' dress, are cut out leaving a ghostly absence shadowed by the sensitive lighting.

Tim Davies - Figures in a Landscape

Installed film sequences in the main gallery of Remembrance Day ceremonies at Aberystwyth and Swansea are timely and poignant. A second film piece, Kilkenny Shift 2009, is aesthetically beautiful and conceptually sensitive - a film sequence ascending and descending the servants' steps in Kilkenny Castle in Ireland. Davies has made previous work using castles as tropes for power, this piece is far more subtle and intimate, commenting on the repetitious and uncelebrated lives of those who gave their lives in service. The message is conveyed through absence and loss - these are themes that resonate throughout the show.

The main gallery shows 40 images, once again using the vehicle of the postcard, each showing the image of a bridge meticulously isolated from its environment through a process of sanding. The images are, again, beautiful. The message is subtle, the bridge as metaphor for connection, power, negotiation. The images also focus in on the structure of the bridge as a strategic military target, a tangible symbol of connection and flow.