Graduate/Graddedig 2012

I went along to the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff last night to the opening of a survey show curated from Wales' graduate courses by Carmarthenshire artist and educator, Peter Finnemore. The show was displayed within the main body of the Centre on three floors and, as Peter Finnemore outlined in his Curators Notes, the architecture of the venue was influential on the choices as well as the quality of the works. It is not an easy space at all in which to show artworks, and with that taken into account it was a good show; it is heartening to see the quality of new work being produced here.

I particularly liked Peter's insightful comments in the introduction of the exhibition catalogue, a clear statement of the political dangers inherent in an environment of austerity and financial anxiety where the arts are a soft target for swingeing cuts.

"...It is well documented that the creative arts (in its many forms) is one of the biggest industries within the UK. It is a tool for regeneration, it drives wealth and it enriches individual well-being, communities and culture. It can also be utilized as a soft power to increase national standing and promotion upon the international stage. A career within the arts is a useful and productive life. The arts and humanities are not a luxury but a necessity. Creative thinking and the acquirement and mastery of artistic skills in traditional and new technological forms are essential to new economies, which themselves are driven by innovation, invention and imaginative problem solving. Creativity is capital.

An investment in art and education is an investment for the future. George Orwell’s laments on the failings of the UK were likened to the wrong family members being in charge; this is true in 2012 as it was in 1941. A political climate of austerity and anxiety, the rise in tuition fees, the arts and humanities being a soft target for cuts, bodes to the fostering of a new dark age upon culture and innovation. Fine Art courses are the creative emblem for any arts based universities; the closing down of an arts course with strong historical traditions, such as the fine art course at the University of Newport, is folly. However this model of thinking is not for everyone, there is room for expansion of the arts; for example, Trinity St David’s in Carmarthen will be starting a new BA (hons) course in Fine Art and Design (Celf a Dylunio) mediated through the Welsh language and a bilingual MA beginning this September.

Set amongst this background there is a continuing personal, social and cultural need for expression, creativity and innovation. Current graduates have a professional outlook upon art making activities and a career within the arts; this exhibition gives evidence to this and the quality and diverse creativity of the arts produced in colleges throughout Wales..."  from Peter Finnemore, Curator's Notes


I also enjoyed being a passive 'performer' in Tiff Oben's MA piece, VIP Area. It was initiated with a formal RSVP invitation sent out through Tiff's mailing list to attend an exclusive VIP event at the opening with complimentary Möet and Chandon champagne. We were required to attend in formal wear and told that the door staff would be refusing entry to informally dressed guests.

"Tiff Oben’s participatory installation, VIP Area, is activated and extended through the viewer’s unknowing participation as they act as central protagonists within the works’ narratives. Blurring the boundaries between reality and performance art, the elitist opening event wilfully aims to create an antagonizing sense of difference within the viewing- audience. The strict and prejudicial entrance requirements upheld by doormen divide friends and acquaintances, segregating and generating a sense of otherness between those on the inside and those on the out. The viewer on the outside focuses, often surreptitiously, on the revelry on the inside. Their exclusion is integral to the work which visualizes and makes an exhibition of exclusivity. Negative responses, confusion, anger, bafflement and division are deliberately and unethically fostered so that it becomes truly inclusive (despite exclusions) and truly participatory (even with those who feel that they could not, or are not allowed to, participate). Thus the politics of viewing are inverted as the viewer becomes
the subject of the work of grotesque, excitement, repression, beauty, fun, and the mundane." From Graduate/Graddedig 2012 catalogue.

I liked the insider-outsider tensions that were set up, and the clever layers of looking that were at play. I don't really own much in the way of formal wear, so that was a challenge before I even got to the venue - I felt suitably discomfited.  It was smart to set this up within the opening of an art exhibition, an event seemingly run-through with exclusive and excluding protocol.

In a similar vein, I've thought a lot recently about the 'Private View' as a phenomena and an accepted term within the art world, it is curiously misleading. For any arts organisation in receipt of public funding, the evaluated focus of pretty much all and every activity is inclusivity and reach into the community, it is only within the purely commercial sector that the term has any true meaning - an event to court the wealthy collector/buyer to part with their cash in advance of the onslaught of the hoi-polloi. I'm all for an opening celebration, but the persistence of 'Private View' as a term means something; something rather dubious perhaps about the institutions of art. The democracy espoused within a lot of art practice and insisted upon through arts funding maintains a revealing dissonance with the protocols and language of the industry.

On the Edge of the World

We said goodbye to our summer exhibition at Oriel Myrddin Gallery today, On the Edge of the World has been a delight to live with for the eight weeks it has been with us. The work was curated from the British Council Collection and was originally shown at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh in 2010 as part of a bi-centenary programme of events to celebrate the achievements and lasting legacy of Charles Darwin.

The exhibition featured work from: boredomresearch, Christine Borland, Dalziel+Scullion, Anya Gallaccio, Tania Kovats, Rob Kesseler, Michael Landy,  Heather & Ivan Morison, Simon Starling, Alison Turnbull, Marc Quinn.

"The 14 contemporary artists selected for this exhibition assume the role of modern-day explorers.  Through their work, they make connections between us, our environment and nature.  For many of them, travel is an important part of their practice; they seek to examine and interpret the complex and changing natural world around us.  Here we see the enduring legacy of Darwin and his commitment to bringing new interpretations, rare discoveries and insights to a wider world carried beyond a scientific community into the imaginations of artists today."

My personal favourite from the show was Tania Kovats' two hundred and eight two, a slice of oak tree  onto which Kovats has traced each individual ring in india ink to make a delicate, poignant record of the  tree's life span.

It was also a great pleasure to host 8 of Michael Landy's etchings from his 2003 Nourishment series. Each etching depicts a common weed that might grow between paving slabs - 'street flowers' as Landy describes them. These were the works that emerged after Landy's famous work Break-down which saw him destroy all of his posessions in 2001.

One of the favourite pieces in the show for our visitors was boredomresearch's Oriental Bug Garden (2004), a digital piece that uses gaming and artificial life modelling technology to create a screen based work that has a self-generating pattern of triggers and collisions which, in turn create an incidental soundtrack. Meditative and tranquil, the sound sets the tone for the whole exhibition in many ways.

The centre piece of the show was arguably Anya Gallaccio's installation, Preserve Beauty (2003). 800 brilliant red Gerbera flowers were installed behind a sheet of glass and left to disintegrate over the duration of the exhibition. The process of decay was quite present in the gallery as the piece went through various stages - sometimes the smell was quite interesting!

Vetch Veg

Owen Griffiths seen here

Swansea has seen a marvelous art project develop on part of the old Vetch site of Swansea City Football Club over the last nine months. Owen Griffiths has been the inspiration and the engine behind creating and populating a community vegetable garden on the site with the enthusiastic participation of local residents and groups. Glynn Vivian Gallery is holding an off-site event, the Sandfields Festival of Ideas on the site this weekend with a lovely programme of events including performance from Peter Finnemore, food from the Bangladeshi Community who have a plot at the garden, music from Joan Joans, Sarah Passmore and the Swansea Ukelele Orchestra, yoga with Glynn Vivian Gallery's Karen MacKinnon and much more...

Vetch Veg is a socially engaged art project commissioned as part of the Cultural  Olympiad, you can read all about the project on the Vetch Veg site.

Assemble/Cydosod at Melin Glonc

If you missed Mike Murray's exhibition, Assemble/Cydosod at Goat Major Projects in Cardiff, you can see selected works at Melic Glonc in Carmarthenshire until 1 September.

Antonia Dewhurst - Ty Unnos/One Night House

Antonia Dewhurst - Tŷ Unnos/One Night House - courtesy of Antonia Dewhurst

 If you are in the Newtown area of Mid Wales, make sure you drop into Oriel Davies to see Antonia Dewhurst's Test Bed Project - Tŷ Unnos in the park adjacent to the gallery. Antonia built the house in accordance with the historical Tŷ Unnos/One Night House tradition:

"Tŷ Unnos is an old Welsh tradition dating back to the 17th century: if one could build a house between the hours of sunset and sunrise and have smoke rising from the chimney by dawn, the ownership of the land could be claimed. While Antonia does not lay claim to Newtown’s park on 19 July she will build a Tŷ Unnos - literally overnight - in the town’s parkland opposite Oriel Davies. This will be a temporary structure made from recycled materials - wooden pallets, tarpaulin and corrugated iron. After a night of feverish building the structure will be in place by the morning of 20 July, complete with smoke rising from the chimney."

Here's a short stop motion video of the construction.

You can also see Antonia's Gimme Shelter series of small scale constructions in the Test Bed Space inside the gallery - including the newly made piece of the Tŷ Unnos in the park.

Courtesy of Antonia Dewhurst

The house remains in situ until 5 September and Antonia is occasionally 'In Residence' - ring the gallery for times on 01686 625 041

Mike Murray - Assembled at Home/ Cydosod yn y Cartref

Mike Murray - Who ya going to call - Seen here

My favourite show of the moment is Mike Murray's Assembled at Home/Cydosod yn y Cartref currently showing at Goat Major Projects in Cardiff.

"Mike Murray will be presenting new works on paper at GMP from 12/08. Murray's watercolours are the result of using the techniques associated with 'Free Association'. The resulting observations look at how we define and associate ideas of self-awareness and character traits through the placement and assembling of groups of what may seem random objects. All these objects come together through a process of experience, memory and personal preference which the person assembling is likely to be unaware of as it is automatic and beyond conscious knowing. The collections appear as dislocated from their surrounding, the places that bring meaning to their use and purpose are removed. A subconscious dialogue occurs between mute objects and we are invited to contemplate the meaning and purpose of the objects that surround us everyday. Mike Murray's work explores ideas and processes that we could term as surrealism, the influence of the subconscious in our everyday and what exists beneath the thin surface we mistakenly describe as reality. The resulting work presents a form of dark humour at odds with the delicate and refined process of the watercolour.

For part of Assembled at Home, Mike will be resident in the project space responding to a book of diagrams for making house hold objects that forms the title of the show."

The show continues until 28 August - look here for opening times.

Colony: Contemporary Art in Alternative Spaces

Sean Puleston

I went to the inaugural opening of a nice new initiative a couple of weeks back in Cardigan, west Wales. Artist, Lee Williams, recently returned to his native Wales from London has gathered together a group of artists to show work in a couple of buildings either side of the river Teifi on Cambrian Quay and Teifi Wharf.  The works on show include installation, photography, video and sculpture and make use of some lovely interior spaces, partly renovated (above Fforest on Tefi Wharf) or partly derelict (Cambrian Quay). Artists showing include: Jonathan Anderson, Alex Duncan, Sean Puleston, Erin Rickard and  Lee Williams. 

The show continues over the bank holiday weekend until 27 August 2012 and if the weather is nice you can also get a bite to eat at Pizza Tipi - lovely!

Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Cymru 2012

Carwyn Evans - Cast

Congratulations to Carwyn Evans for his gold medal win at The National Eisteddfod of Wales 2012 in the Vale of Glamorgan. I was particularly proud to see Carwyn's work win as I know that his time working with us at Oriel Myrddin Gallery in 2011 as part of our Project Object series of exhibitions was instrumental in bringing this current work into being.

The Gold Medal for Craft was won by Anne Gibbs with a series of abstract arrangements of ceramic objects Am gael bod rhywle arall / To be elsewhere.

Other highlights for me were Angharad Pearce Jones' new Tirlun y torrwr / Disc cutter landscape series and Sarah Ball's little portrait paintings.

Rhôd 2012

Clare Thornton - Tact Series: Orange

I had the great privilege in 2012 to be selected as curator for Rhôd 2012. Now in its fourth year this annual contemporary art event is held at Melin Glonc, a 16th Century corn mil set in 11 acres of ground in the rural village of Drefelin in Carmarthenshire.

Over the four years of its existence the event has seen about fifty artists exhibit on the site both inside and in the grounds of the mill building. I was selected to show my own work there in 2010.

For the 2012 event in early June, I chose ten artists to participate in the show all of whom visited the mill over the preceding months and made their work in response to the site, Jonathan Anderson (Swansea), Phil Babot (Cardiff), Antonia Dewhurst (Conwy), Eddy Dreadnought (Sheffield), Maura Hazelden (Pembrokeshire), Anne-Mie Melis (Cardiff), Seren Stacey (Carmarthenshire), Clare Thornton (Bristol), Jobina Tinnemans (Pembrokeshire), Elizabeth Tomos (Carmarthenshire).

Eddy Dreadnought - Moving Away from Aborescence - Towards a Rhizomatic Future

 

Pete Telfer from Culture Colony was kind enough to film the event and me talking about the artists' contributions to the show - you can watch it here - if you are not a member of Culture Colony you can register for free to watch dedicated Welsh arts content.

Seren Stacey - Untitled (detail)

The Institute for Imagined Futures and Unknown Lands...

Fern Thomas - When the Moon Fell Out of Orbit

The current exhibition at Mission Gallery in Swansea is When the Moon Fell Out of Orbit by Fern Thomas. Following her recent MA studies at Oxford Brookes University in Social Sculpture, Fern has established the Institute for Imagined Futures and Unknown Lands. Through her research she is exploring intuitive thoughts and visions brought through dreams, imaginative ideas and images to ask questions of our current condition in the world and what our future might hold. The artworks use texts, objects, structures, performances and actions to set a kind of transformative process into being through which she and her audience engage in an ongoing exploration of the resulting imagined material.

There has been a series of weekly performances during the show in which Fern relates a series of dreamed/imagined narratives full of poetic and symbolic triggers, through repeating these sequences she hopes to come to a greater understanding of their significance, these are active interventions into the collective imagination which is manifested through and around the exhibition.

The works are also beautifully imagined within the gallery space and make direct reference to the history of the architecture of Mission Gallery. 

The exhibition runs until 15 July 2012.

Antonia Dewhurst - Ty Unnos

Antonia Dewhurst - Gimme Shelter - seen here

I am really looking forward to Antonia Dewhurst's forthcoming Test Bed project at Oriel Davies Gallery in Newtown. Antonia's series of shelters, Gimme Shelter which were made as part of her degree work at Coleg Menai, Bangor in 2010/11 have led her to undertake the creation of a Ty Unnos dwelling in the parkland alongside Oriel Davies on the night of 19/20 July 2012.

"The tradition of the Ty Unnos (One Night House) was established in Wales around the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th century when  over 5000 Enclosure Acts were passed. This resulted in common land being passed into the hands of landowners. In response to the resulting homelessness and poverty there was a rise in the tradition of the Ty Unnos.

Thought to date back to Hywel Dda, but never enshrined in law, this tradition stated that if a house could be built between sunset and sunrise and have smoke rising from its chimney at dawn, then the builder could keep the house and the land as far as a hammer or axe could be thrown from each of the quarters.

Materials would be collected secretly over several months and all the builder's friends and family would be involved on the night. Often the only clue the landowner's agent would find was that the local carpenter was making a door for someone. However, the house was often pretty primitive and the 'door' might be a woven hazel screen, the walls of cut peat, the roof thatched with gorse or whatever was to hand. The chimney too might be of woven hazel or willow and these house-names persist today e.g. Corn Helyg, Willow Chimney.

Once the house-builder's title was established they could amass more permanent building materials and replace the original building with a more substantial dwelling and these too persist into the present day in the house-name Ty Newydd - the new house."

Antonia Dewhurst - Materials for Ty Unnos - Courtesy of Antonia Dewhurst

  

In keeping with the tradition, Antonia has been collecting her materials over the last couple of months and is getting ready to undertake the building of her dwelling overnight on 19/20 July.

January at Mostyn Oriel

I took a trip up to north Wales last weekend to see Gareth Griffith's exhibition Shelter at Mostyn Oriel in which I had a small piece of work. The show was really lovely (it closed on 15th January), about 60 artists had contributed and the work was shown on a simple trestle table as a 'field' of shelters. A crazy artists campsite of miniature dwellings! All sorts of ingenious solutions had been devised to the brief to make a shelter 20 x 20 x 15 cm out of found materials or materials to hand.

I was also glad to get to see the other shows currently running in the gallery, Ha Ha Road in the main gallery space takes a look at the use of humour in contemporary art - "The selected artworks demonstrate how acts of absurdity, irrationality or playfulness can interrupt reality and momentarily destabilise common assumptions." The perfect antidote to post-Christmas gloom, many of the works genuinely raised a smile. 

Grazia Toderi - Orbite Rossa - seen here

I also enjoyed Grazia Toderi's video Orbite Rossa installed in gallery 6 as part of the gallery's Love Video series. Night-time cityscapes are layered and superimposed  in a slowly changing vista of lights. The result is a mesmerizing and slightly disorientating experience, the gradual alterations to the landscape and the impossible movements of light within it set up beautiful. "...luminous geometries...". Personally, I saw a kind of melancholic dystopia - Blade Runner came to mind with its nocturnal rooftop city scenes - a balance of beauty and sadness in the universal city-at-night.

Shelter @ Oriel Mostyn

Kathryn Campbell Dodd - Absente

I was asked to contribute a piece of work to the newly opened show in gallery 4 at Mostyn in Llandudno, Shelter. The show features the work of over 60 artists in Wales who were asked to respond to the brief set by the originator of the Shelter concept Gareth Griffith. 

Griffith began by making paintings of a tent in which he went on family holidays and through this exploration started to construct small shelters which he used as maquettes for further paintings. After creating a number of these pieces, he invited other artists to make similar constructions.

We were asked to make a structure 20 x 20 x 15 inches out of found materials or materials to hand. My piece is called Absente and uses the top of a bird-box from the woods by my house, an absinthe spoon, skewers and chopsticks that I found in the kitchen draw and a cover made from scraps of white fabric stitched together to create a canopy.

The show runs from 3 December - 15 January 2011.

Henry Krokatsis

Henry Krokatsis - Dantalux, 2010 - seen here

I went along to Chapter Arts Centre last week and had a quick look around their new show A Fire in the Master's House is Set, curated by Simon Morrissey. I didn't have time to fully explore on this occasion, but I was immediately struck by two fantastic works by Henry Krokatsis which use found mirrors cut up and rearranged to fit together into one hybridised piece. The way the mirrors are placed serves to fragment the reflection so that a full image can never quite be seen. I didn't know about this artist so I'm intrigued and excited to find out some more.

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

Second Star to the Right and Straight on Until Morning

Ben Rowe - Second Star to the Right and Straight on Until Morning

I finally got to see Ben Rowe's solo show, Second Star to the Right and Straight on Until Morning at Mission Gallery in Swansea this weekend, it closes on 24 July  so there is only a week left to catch it. 

The craftsmanship involved in the making of his MDF recreations of futuristic machines from iconic 1980's films is incredibly impressive. There is an obsessive focus involved in his working process, it can take him many months to create one of his sculptures in all its minute detail. 

The blandness of the material is unsettling, Rowe uses it to speak about the futility of escapism - the fictional machines he references often involve some kind of travel, but the uniformity of their construction in his hands and their ultimate uselessness denies the fantasy. The effect is somewhat dystopic, it does not bode well somehow for our society. Ultimately we have to stand face-to-face with the existential reality of ourselves in our world with all the frustrations and yearnings that involves but with little control over its mechanics.

Perhaps this is the purest kind of gesture an artist can make (and perhaps it is only artists that CAN make such a gesture) in confrontation with this unbearable futility of being.

¿AreWeNotDrawnOnwardToNewEra?

Last Saturday I popped in on g39 in Cardiff to say goodbye to their current venue. The three storey town house in Mill Lane has housed the gallery for the last 13 years, and in that time Cardiff has changed around it, it now sits slap-bang in a prime spot near the new shopping centre. The new venue has not yet been announced but, as the palindrome that creates the title for the last exhibition in the venue suggests ¿AreWeNotDrawnOnwardToNewEra?  it's not an ending, but a transition. Here are some images from the day.

Homage: New works by Roger Cecil

Roger Cecil - Untitled 2011

We are delighted at Oriel Myrddin Gallery to have opened our current exhibition of paintings by Abertillary artist Roger Cecil. We were very lucky to have a show of Roger's work at the gallery called Cariad in 2006, and now, 5 years later a completely new body of work has been created especially to show in the gallery. 

The progression in Roger's work in those 5 years is self evident in this cohesive collection of works, more minimal and less 'worked' than previous paintings, the artist often allows the board on which he works to become part of the composition. These are resolved and confident works from one of Wales' best painters working in the mature years of his career. It is inspiring to find an artist continuing to push his practice and develop his work at this stage of his life when it might be quite easy to rest on one's laurels.

Roger was at the opening on Saturday 25 June, but with customary modesty left the building when Meg Anthony, the Gallery Manager spoke about him and his working processes, he is a down-to-earth man who finds superlatives uncomfortable.

We are very proud that this show is being exclusively shown in the gallery, it continues until 27 August. If you are at all interested in contemporary painting, don't miss this exceptional show!

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.

Tim Davies @ Venice Biennale

The Welsh Pavilion has found a new home for the 54th Venice Biennale. Having been slightly off the beaten track on Guidecca for previous manifestations it now nestles between the two main exhibition spaces, Arsenale and Giardini at The Ludoteca Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, Castello. It's a fantastic location and a great space, a 16th Century ex-convent now run as a community centre.

The first artist to occupy this new location for Wales is Swansea based, Tim Davies. Davies was  a popular choice from the proposals submitted for representation and he has produced a solid and cohesive body of work including two new video pieces made especially for the show which directly reference his experience in Venice. Other works are from his portfolio including two video works along with his Bridges series of altered postcards. Davies has worked alongside his long time colleague as curator for this show, Tom Rowland. The curation of the show is subtly evident as remarked on by Dai Smith, Chairman of The Arts Council of Wales, in his opening speech, it has a symphonic quality which gives the work a building rhythm within the architecture.

I have always enjoyed the materiality of Davies work and the meticulous processes he uses in bringing it into being, so I was pleased that the show was not solely focused on video works. Bridges (2009 - 2011) is a series of 60 framed postcards of bridges in different locations, the artist has, by meticulous scratching, isolated each bridge from its landscape in so doing, drawing attention to its function and significance. The collection sits particularly well in Venice with its endless canals and little bridges, something one is only too well aware of when negotiating the labyrinthine streets.

The older works showing are films, Cadet (Running and Parade at Cardiff) 2010 and Cadet (Standing at Aberystwyth) 2006 both of which take the War Memorial and young cadets at Remembrance Day services as their subject in a reflection on the senselessness of losing young lives to war.

Tim Davies - Drift (2010)

The most iconic of the new works is arguably a new piece of work called Drift (2011) the film focuses on Davies hand as he travels along one of Venice's canals gently touching the surface of the water, we can see the reflection of the Venetian buildings, and the intervention of his hand touching the water constantly disturbs the image. It is beautiful, tender and meditative. I was quite enchanted on first viewing, however on subsequent viewings something unsettling began to emerge for me. Partly a little ripple of feminist disquiet - something about the nuances of the action, but also something about dilettantism - especially in the context of Venice as a destination on the Grand Tour. Maybe there is also a comment on the Biennale itself as an event with which visitors interact often quite superficially, seduced by its prestige, pedigree and the romanticism of its location.

The final work in the show is Frari (2011), a film made from collaged stills taken in the bell tower of the Campanile Santa Maria dei Frari. It has a painterly quality as the film builds through semi abstracted images. The soundtrack provides a tension and reminds us of the performative element involved in making the work. Of all the works it is the least didactic, it feels to be more about pure experience.

Tim Davies deserves this opportunity to represent his country and he has made a solid show for this new space which talks about place without tipping into the dangerous territory of sentimentality.