| A Look-back and Guide |
Public Event |
| Conferences, celebrations, exhibitions, sculpture , Wales north, south, west , January 21, 2025 |
Painting, sculpture, photography, television, politics, aesthetics are written about below:11 March 2020: Ben Dearnley, Sebastian Boyesen, Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch: public art on the Ceredigion coast “Sculpture does not even have to be at a physical border to cause trouble. Peter Lord as an artist was as well qualified as any to execute a commission in the 1980s in Whitland. As he describes it in in his autobiography, the project Cofeb Hywel Da aroused the ire of the Labour Party. The artist set to his work and a resident would stop each day with “why don’t you f*** off back where you came from?” Croeso yma.” * * * * 01 June 2019: Carol Cadwalladr at Hay Festival “The hour leaves several impressions. One is the fact of old-fashioned journalistic grunt-work. Even with all the research resources of the Internet, the story is driven by the smell that there is something out there. There are dots waiting to be joined up. The second is human vulnerability, a boozy encounter, a participant who just needs to brag how clever they have been. A name pops out of the dark: Cambridge Analytica. A US academic is on the case and Cadwalladr has been on the phone at length with him. He can see something in the torrents of tweets, the deceptions and the fakery. He can see an order within it all, a centralising presence, the finger pointing to Moscow.” * * * * 31 May 2019 Simon Schama at Hay Festival , “Simon Schama‘s subject at the Hay Festival for 2019 is “Rembrandt’s Eyes.” Schama is an academic and media phenomenon for a reason; he is an art critic of greatness. Great critics move across four levels. They home in on the detail. They know their aesthetics intimately, confident in their judgements on form, content, meaning, expression. They have facts at their finger-tips: the life, love, money, or the lack of both, the context of history, the critical climate. And they yoke the first three to personal response. Jejune critical writing, that is swamped with the words “I” and “me”, makes a categorical error, that the subjective takes first place.” * * * * 18 April 2019: Jonah Jones Centenary at Oriel Plas Glyn y Weddw “The centenary of Jonah Jones, born 17th February 1919, has been marked with an exhibition at Oriel Plas Glyn y Weddw. He was subject of a characteristically elegant obituary by Meic Stephens for the Independent on 2nd December 2004. Stephens encapsulated the life’s work in his opening sentence. “Jonah Jones was a sculptor who, despite a lack of formal training, won a reputation as a master-craftsman in stone and, in particular, as an artist devoted to the word in all its visual forms, from calligraphy to the inscriptions on gravestones.” * * * * 24 July 2017: Monumental public sculpture at Flint “Uniquely in the four nations of the United Kingdom the arts in Wales are stalked by the tourist interest. The guardians of culture lean its way despite the fact that the aims of art and tourism are at odds. There is plenty of good small-scale public art. I stop sometime to see Llywelyn at Llandovery, St Crannog on the Ceredigion cliffs or O.M. Edwards in Llanuwchllyn. But larger-scale public art has a background in Wales. Last year Machynlleth’s MOMA staged a debate over tourist slogans being dropped in National Park locations under the purported guise of art. Meredydd Barker wrote a play a few years back called Two Princes that revolved around a work of a public sculpture in a fictional town in Pembrokeshire. Peter Lord relates in his scintillating memoir Relationship with Pictures the grief that ensued over a public commission in Whitland.” * * * * 05 June 2017: Four historians of Wales at Hay Festival “For all its glorious heterogeneity the Festival has a few strands of regularity and continuity. One of them is the presence on platform of the historians of Wales. They are reliably lively on a podium. They are manifestly good lecturers one and all. They have an enthusiasm for Wales that is tempered by a preference for historical truth over cultural self-congratulation. Every ship that made the Middle Passage, reported Chris Evans, had its hull protected from weevil by the copper of Wales. Every gram of sugar produced from plantation cane did so in stills made from the metal of Wales. As Madeleine Gray in a former year put it: “We want history to be a comfort blanket but it’s there to make us ask the questions.” * * * * 28 April 2017: A & B Two Centenaries: Abse and Burgess Leo Abse received as fine a commendation as there might be from a Prime Minister. James Callaghan: “you do more good in terms of human happiness than 90% of work done in parliament on political issues.” That is an epitaph to treasure. * * * * 2nd July 2016: Showing of film “the Battle of the Somme” * * * * 1st July 2016: An Equality of Suffering: The Somme Remembered * * * * 18 December 2016: Art at Machynlleth and Oriel Plas Glyn-y-Weddw “John Cyrlas Williams' output was as prodigious as it was compressed. One hundred and fifty pictures survive from a career that had ceased by age thirty. The title for this rich selection was appropriately “A Brief Flowering.” Highlights included “the Studio” “the Life Studio, Newlyn” and “Lynne, the Artist's Sister, at “Sandringham”, Porthcawl”. * * * * 12 September 2016: Jeremy Moore nature photography “A similarly pale and evanescent colouring was created by Moore for a triple picture of swans, that featured in a summer exhibition, Bird/ Land, at Aberystwyth Arts Centre. The format was unusual, thirty-eight sets of three photographs measuring twelve inches by just three inches in height. The lighting effects – tokens of extraordinary care and much patience – defy reproduction. If these images required direct apprehension Moore has left a selection of his work in another book. Pembrokeshire Journeys and Stories, also from Gomer, dates from 2011. It is slender at one hundred and fifty pages. The images are augmented by text by Trevor Fishlock. It is the best book there is on Pembrokeshire.” * * * * 20 June 2016: Jonathon Riley on the Great War * * * * 24 May 2015: David Aaronovitch, Peter Hitchens, politics at Hay Festival “It’s nine a.m. Bank Holiday Monday. We’re sitting in a tent in the country and talking about politics. Don’t say that we are representative.” The voice is that of David Aaronovitch, broadcaster and Times columnist. His fellow panellists are Prospect Editor Bronwen Maddox in the Chair, Peter Hitchens of the Mail and Johann Hari of the Independent.” * * * * 28 August 2014 Falcon Hildred exhibition at Newport Art Gallery “Falcon Hildred has been resident in Gwynedd since his purchase of Melin Pant-yr-Ynn in Bethania in 1969. He warmed at once to the landscape around Blaenau Ffestiniog with its twenty quarries, its abandoned tramway tracks, its tips and terraces. Most importantly it had ‘no fat ring of mediocrity around it’. The restoration of the mill, still smelling strongly of rust, was done on a negligible income, a tribute to craft where not an item of plastic intrudes. Pete Telfer’s film depicts the artist as lucid, expository and unshowy. ‘I didn’t want to do work that only brought in money,’ he says; ‘My drawings have a job to do.’ Falcon Hildred is a unique artist and Peter Wakelin’s book does full and rightful honour. The late recognition is a natural extension to the Royal Commission’s curatorial role. With support from the Lottery, it acquired in 2011 over six hundred of Hildred’s drawings in joint ownership with the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust.” * * * * 15 July 2014: Ivor Roberts-Jones sculpture Jonathan Black & Sarah Ayres “Abstraction and Reality” is a title that might mislead. This study of the work and life of sculptor Ivor Roberts-Jones is light on speculation, abstraction or curatorial pirouetting. A fine tribute to Wales' foremost maker of public art in the twentieth century it comprises four essays by Jonathan Black and one by Sarah Ayres. The second half of the book is one hundred and forty pages of catalogue raisoné, notes, index and chronology. It is a heavyweight book, large in format, containing two thirty-five of the drawings and two hundred and twenty-eight photographs of the sculpture. Photographs for comparison feature works by Rodin, Gustav Vigeland, Walter Gropius, Elisabeth Frink and Charles Sargeant Jagger. The frequent documentary photographs include a full-page illustration of four Prime Ministers assembled in the Commons before a sculpture of one of their predecessors.” * * * * 25 May 2014: John Uzzell Edwards & Charlie Uzzell Edwards at Tenby Gallery John Uzzell Edwards died on March 5th. As a result Tenby’s planned exhibition, featuring father and son artists on opposite walls, was amended. The re-selection of fifteen pictures became broader, drawing from work across several decades, albeit all representing the human form. The result in Tenby’s Face to Face exhibition is not just a worthy valediction but a visually bracing tribute to art, and ideas of art, across the generations.” * * * * 22 May 2014: Francesca Woodman photography at Bodelwyddan Castle “Two facts predominate about Francesca Woodman. She died in 1981 at the age of twenty-two and she left behind a body of work of ten thousand photographs. The tour that comes to Bodelwyddan, courtesy of the Art Fund and Arts Council of England, comprises eighteen that make for an absorbing exhibition of unique character.” * * * * 14 April 2014: Ivor Roberts-Jones exhibition at National Museum “The exhibition at the National Museum is the polar opposite of this public monument-making. A single first floor room houses twenty-six works, mainly busts. The height of the displays moves between eye level and chest-height. It makes for a particularly intimate, close-up relationship with Roberts-Jones’ subjects. The closeness is reminiscent of Dannie Abse when he stood beside a Dylan Thomas head for a television documentary. He saw an ‘astonishingly wild and haunted Dylan head staring into space, his tie awry, a cigarette drooping between his lips. The dead’ said Abse ‘can sometimes come alive for a moment.’ * * * * 14 October 2013: Kyffin in Venice “The occasion for ‘Kyffin in Venice’ was a television documentary, acclaimed at the time and now archived inaccessibly. The book comprises twenty-two photographs, twenty-one paintings and a dozen drawings. The text, a transcribed conversation with David Meredith, spans biography, motivation and method, artists and art history.” * * * * 19 June 2013: Future climate dialogues arts and science convergence “The speakers launch off on an intellectual enquiry of vaulting breadth and stimulus. John Gerald’s “Herball” of 1597 leads on to a pre-herbicidal British field threaded with the toxins of choke, earcockle, endophyte and ergot. The speakers close with the Little Ice Age, the disastrous harvests and the food riots of 1607, including those in Warwickshire to which Shakespeare would have been witness. This is criticism wrought for a new century.” * * * * 18 June 2013: Future climate dialogues arts and science convergence “Mark Macklin, Professor of Physical Geography, illuminates another area held in common. His presentation has put photographs of river basins- he is a fluvial geomorpologist- next to abstractly patterned linoprints. He is asked from the floor whether the core languages of science and art do not diverge. The scientific method is underpinned by concern with method, number and validity. Not so, he answers, he has statisticians and others on the team, but his research is fuelled by recognition of pattern, conceptualisation, and a capacity to envisage a site three-dimensionally. This sense of powerful vision has a noble tradition in science. August Kekule grasped the structure of the benzene ring while daydreaming. Leo Szilard conceived the notion of the chain reaction from the switch of colour on a Bloomsbury Square traffic light.” * * * * 30 May 2013: Politics and history at Hay Festival “The First Minister an hour later states that the challenge of an intention, specifically Wales’ inbuilt sustainability commitment, is ‘to take the Bill and turn it into something tangible.’ * * * * 29 May 2013 Six Historians, A Minister, a Journalist doing history at Hay “Chris Evans’ pitch for Merthyr makes the simplest of points. Coalbrookdale may have stolen the historical limelight but it had one great defect. It could never have achieved mass-volume manufacture because of its dependence on charcoal for energy. That demanded a vegetable input, which in turn required an unfeasible quantity of labour and an unavailable supply of forest. The smelters of Merthyr were fed for the first time with a supply of mineral energy available in near limitless quantity.” * * * * 25 May 2013 Gideon Koppel filming Borth ‘What can the camera do that the eye can’t do on its own?’ The question is barked out to Gideon Koppel at the end of his introduction to the opening of his film installation Borth. His forty-minute talk, in Aberystwyth’s sleek Arts Centre cinema, has recounted the technical challenge behind his creation of a single travelling shot of the houses that back onto Borth’s beach. Koppel has glided with ease past references to Beckett, Deleuze and Heidegger, and his questioner is easily answered. ‘The camera creates a frame,’ he says, ‘and it lingers where the eye moves on.’ * * * * 18 April 2013: "Bathing Beauties" Imagined Beach Huts at festival of architecture “Alan Hewson’s decision to create and mount a Festival of Architecture has two lines of reasoning behind it. Firstly, after the critical and popular success of the Eye, the Festival of Photography in 2012, architecture is a natural extension to the artistic range celebrated at the Arts Centre under his leadership. Secondly, the Arts Centre is itself a piece of noteworthy architecture that befits its status as cultural centre for West Wales and beyond. Like Theatr Clwyd Cymru the original Theatr Y Werin was given a hilltop site. Both projects were instances of partnership whereby a local civic institution, County Council or University, took on a role of service and property maintenance, as host for the national arts strategy of Wales.” * * * * 11 October 2012: Portraits of Olympians. Lorraine Bewsey “Painting the Flame” “The term “photographic” might be applied but her work is a world away from that of a Richard Estes. The luminosity of colour evokes better the craft of the generation of Byam Shaw, himself encouraged as a fifteen year old by Millais. Tanni Grey-Thompson wears a necklace of several different jewels. An opal is possessed of a Holbein-like lustre and depth. “Lorraine Bewsey states her intention: “I want my portraits not only to draw out the essential character of my subjects, but to be appreciated for the quality of line and tone…to feel that the skill of an individual artist in drawing and painting is important.” * * * * 29 September 2012: David Hurn at the Eye International Photography Festival “David Alston from the Arts Council of Wales has opened the festival with a reminder that photography is document. That word, he says, has its roots in the Latin for ‘teach’. Hurn’s selection of pictures covers the span of fact and imagination. After a heart-achingly romantic 1915 Kertesz he shows a puzzle picture. A line of men may be participants in a peculiar religious rite. Look closer and some small rubber suckers reveal they are doing no more than nudging a plate glass window into place. He shows a Duane Michals sequence of a surreal and witty circularity. Richard Avedon sends a brave model to pose in a convex curve between two elephants.” * * * * 18 July 2012: Geraint Ellis, Dylan Moore at Cyfrwng conference “Geraint Ellis adds a caveat “But we're a small country, and it's not easy.” This lack of ease has several strands. Earlier in the day a dialogue between Dafydd James and Ed Thomas has concluded “A minority culture is defensive and it’s easy to be defensive from one perspective.” A part of it is expressed by Barn writer Sioned Williams. Like it or not, there is a genuine feeling of appreciation that a work has come into existence at all. Catrin Beard adds that in a small artistic world the likelihood of creator and critic being known to one another is high. Critics are human as well. Dylan Moore adds that he has given the National Theatre of Wales a broad thumbs-up. But, among the twenty productions so far, his enrolment in the company’s own scheme has not inhibited an occasional hefty kicking.” * * * * 10 May 2008: Cyfrwng conference on media convergence “In the National Library’s Drwm and Council Chamber the words used repeatedly by the Welsh delegates are rare or wholly absent in “Cultural Convergence.” A reader has to search hard for the words “civic”, “public”, “citizen”, “accountability.” A reader will search in vain for the words “artistry”, “skill” and “quality.” It is right that reporters from topical times are heard within media decision-making but scary if the inner circles begin to think it has universal application across all strands-brands. Vox poppery is a valueless time-filler in the presentation of news. “We are not just consumers. We are also citizens.” This phrase catches the mood of the conference. Tom O’Malley of the University of Aberystwyth is on the panel for Cyfrwng’s closing session. “Let’s not get be caught up by wild utopianism” he says “ nor too carried away by technology” * * * * 06 May 2008: Cyfrwng conference on public and private space “Kevin Williams, Professor of Media and Communications at Swansea, has written in Planet 173 on the structural inadequacies of the Welsh media. If anything, the situation in 2008, as represented forcefully by Meic Birtwhistle of NUJ Cymru, has deteriorated. At the Western Mail circulation drops inexorably, journalist numbers decline and profits rise. Wales’ national newspaper is the most profitable part of Trinity Mirror’s empire, buoyed up on a sea of public sector advertising.” * * * * 06 May 2008: Cyfrwng conference on old and new media “The subject of public space has a theorist and champion in David Marquand, policy advisor turned MP turned academic. His 2004 book “The Decline of the Public: the Hollowing-out of Citizenship” tracks, in his view, the thirty-year assault both intellectually and practically on the public domain by a mixture of neo-liberals, marketisers and commercial interests. “There is nothing natural about the public domain. It is a gift of history and fairly recent history at that. It is literally a priceless gift. The goods of the public domain cannot be valued by market criteria, but no less precious for that.” |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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