Welsh Artist of the Year 2013

Sarah Ball - Gang member IV

I was privileged to be a selector for Welsh Artist of the Year 2013 this year, along with artist and broadcaster, Richard Huw Morgan, painter, Neale Howells, Ceramicist, Christine Jones and St David's Gallery Exhibition Officer, Ruth Cayford. Today the awards ceremony was held at St David's Hall in Cardiff.

The winner, painter Sarah Ball was for me a clear contender from the start. The diminutive size of her skilfully made portraits bring a powerful intensity to her work and echo the photographs from which they were sourced (often from police records and museum archives).  They have the slightly unsettling presence of subjects in a rogues’ gallery. Isolated from the background paraphernalia of life, like mug shots or passport photos, the faces and titles alone must tell you their story. They have a ghost-like quality which reminds us of the very function of a portrait, to capture a fleeting, living moment and hold it still for our gaze forever. Peering in to the fine details, as you must to appreciate these pieces, you are drawn in to imagine the circumstances and stories that might lie behind the image.

John Abell - Three Graces: All the Floods Left Them

The runner-up this year was also a very strong voice in the mix. John Abell is a young print-maker of exuberant talents – he describes himself on his blog as ‘…artist, vagabond and part-time dandy ’and that energy and swagger is apparent in his large-scale woodcuts. Like Sarah Ball, he is telling stories but the techniques could not be more different, Abell’s work is audaciously vigorous and bold. The materials he uses to make his printing plates are scavenged and makeshift bringing an edgy immediacy to an ancient technique.

David Barnes received the photography prize this year for his image Swan. Again we are invited to engage with implied story telling through his cleverly realised compositions and subjects which often hint at nefarious or marginal antics and exchanges but also bring into play sophisticated subtexts of visual language.

There are two sculpture prizes this year, for quite different pieces of work. Sean Olsen's intriguing robot Paint-Bot V-2 which we imagine might create its own strange artworks – it has the dormant quality of a ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’ that might be snapped into life at any moment. Jonathan Anderson’s glossy, black ‘Dark Anomaly’ is a departure from his often-used material of coal-dust, bringing a raw edge to his sculpture that simultaneously talks about the beauty and mystery of the infinite cosmos and the lumpen materiality and insatiable consumption of human beings.

We were spoiled for choice with ceramics this year with a very strong submission of exceptional work, the winner, Morgen Hall surprised us with her new collection of soda fired porcelain tapas dishes that could as easily be sculptural objects as functional ceramic ware.

The drawing prize, awarded to Iwan Bala recognised the media and techniques he has used in his work on paper. There is a distinct sense of materiality, with the rough textures and the use of drawing implements and washes to create this and his other distinctive works. Bala is known for the political and polemical content of his work, but this prize also acknowledges the artistic choices in their making.

A photograph by Patricia Zaid won the Student Prize and takes a quite traditional subject of a chapel interior bringing a timeless poignancy and atmospheric quality to the image.

Four artists were highly commended, Jin Eui Kim for his ceramic piece Object No. 8, Jo Berry for her painting, Untitled, Jonathan Williams for his photograph, Home is not where you live, but where they understand you and Angharad Pearce Jones' for her sculpture triptych Disc Cutter Landscapes.

Artemisia

I went to the opening of Artemesia, a group show (in which I have two new works showing) last night. Curated by Ruth Cayford, the show is at St David's Hall Gallery in Cardiff and features the work of over 40 contemporary women artists currently practicing in Wales, celebrating the ideas they have in 2011. Here is the essay written for the show by Sue Griffith, Head of School of Contextual Studies & Fine Art, Swansea Metropolitan University.

"Maybe the existing forms of art for the ideas men have had are inadequate for the ideas women have."' Susana Torre, 1976

Artemisia Gentileschi lends her name to this extensive exhibition, which brings together the work of numerous women artists currently active in Wales. She was not only an extraordinary Renaissance artist, but also occupied a key role in the recovery of women artists’ history begun by feminists around forty years ago, who sifted through centuries of neglect, not only to uncover forgotten women artists, but perhaps more importantly, they identified shared expressions for the women artists yet to come.

Art’s forms and content have not been without issues for women artists, since both had been defined by male artists. It took a further ideological leap for women to shift from battling with exclusion to a positive questioning of approaches to creativity, emerging from a wish to express their differences, differently. That women might re-define art’s practice by exploring what had hitherto been invisible or defined as ‘not art’, produced some provocative work. Stylistic innovation was perhaps not the most important of these differences, the ‘ideas that women have’ most certainly was. It became clear that historical frictions bound in to the two roles - woman and artist - presented them with unique challenges. What has become clearer now, is that these challenges have enriched their work.

Women’s greater participation in art has transformed art, flipping the subtly nuanced labels sometimes used to relegate their work to obscurity in the Fine Arts (charming, decorative, domestic) entirely on their heads. Refusing hierarchies, they have explored (using that old feminist adage) the personal with the political, intimacy with the allegorical, sensitivity with edginess, the fragile with the dark, fantasy with fetish. In short their creative strategies are as diverse and multi-textured as women themselves, and are abundantly evidenced in this exhibition.

The complexity of human relationships, including self-identity, is navigated through memory and fantasy, and is just as likely to be intensely personal as it is universally symbolic. Desires for connection are also explored through responses to place or location, and might reference the landscape of history, or even pre-history, or the personal space of the domestic. The body, that well contested area, is still of immense importance to a number of the artists here, particularly evidenced through performance based art; its potential for ritual significance seems endless. Drawing is clearly immensely valued as a visualising tool, but no more so than stitching, printing, constructing, photographing, filming and mark making from the fragile to the urgent.

But never forget that whilst our recognition of the ideas and creativity which women have brought to art may seem a recent understanding, in truth Artemisia was already there; it is recognised that her intense portrayal of powerful women differed from interpretations by her male peers. The contest we now face, in a time when arts education is seriously threatened, is that of ensuring that the gains women artists have made in the past forty years are never underestimated and continue to influence art. This exhibition is a timely reminder that Artemisia’s legacy needs to be wholeheartedly celebrated.

The exhibition Features works from:

Sue Williams, Rozanne Hawksley, Catrin Webster, Di Setch, Dilys Jackson, Virginia Head, Rebecca Spooner, Adele Vye, Fern Thomas, Amanda Roderick, Gemma Copp, Anna Barrett, Jacqueline Alkema, Corrie Chiswell, Becky Adams, Susan Adams, Kathryn Ashhill, Kathryn Campbell Dodd, Heather Eastes, Annie Giles Hobbs, Ruth Harries, Penny Hallas, Mary Husted, Daphne Hurn, Ann Jordon, Tiff Oben, Luned Rhys Parri, Jane Taylor, Miranda Whall, Dawn Woolley, Sue Hunt, Rebecca Gould, Eirian Llwyd, Lisa Jones, Nicola O’Neill, Ruth McLees, Bella Kerr, Helen Booth, Jean Walcot, Jo Alexander, Wendy Couling, Su Roberts, Janet Walters and Lisa Tann.

Artemesia continues until April 9th.

Gareth Hugh Davies

Gareth Hugh Davies - Clochyrie 2008 - seen here

One of the great things about Oriel Myrddin Gallery is that all the staff are artists too; we are all either practising artists, writers or crafts people or were trained as such. One of our crew, Gareth Hugh Davies is a painter and is currently showing work at St David's Hall Gallery in Cardiff. The show continues until 11 June.

Gareth Hugh Davies - Limen 2010 - seen here

Gareth uses painting to explore the liminal , the difficult to articulate thresholds, the unknowable and mysterious. He says of his own work: "My work is an investigation into the relationship between the aesthetic, cultural and mythological in landscape painting..." and painting is a unmatchable vehicle for this kind of exploration. He quotes Simon Morley on this process in his artists statement: '...a mental state in which this self is brought to the brink of dissolution through confrontation with the powerful experience of unboundedness of no longer being securely sited within a unified self'.

Gareth Hugh Davies - Equinox 2010 - seen here

Alongside this 'spritual' investigation, there is a darkness - menace, even, in Gareth's work. The traditional form of landscape painting provides an anchor which allows it to tread into unstable territory. Twighlight and night scenes make the familiar worrying, glowing orange lights in house windows, bonfires and car headlights become ambiguous points of connection in the indigo of dusk and night time. Welcoming and friendly on the one hand, dangerously alluring on another - we become moths at the flame. Tracks and traces in snowy woodlands lead us...where - to whom, or to what? Gareth had a solo show at Oriel Myrddin Gallery in 2007 entitled Olion, a Welsh word which hints at these tracks, traces and marks both in the content of his work and in the process of painting as a medium.