THE PRIVATE VIEW IS NOW ON TUESDAY, JULY 30th AT 7pm. You are very welcome to join the artists at the launch of our exhibition in Aberdare.
I spent three years travelling cross South Wales with Rhondda pre-historian Dewi Bowen and Swansea filmmaker Melvyn Williams, drawing and painting Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age stone monuments. Dewi was researching for his new book “Hunting The Wild Megalith” and I, initially along for the ride, found myself inspired by the ancient landscape formed by the stones.
My beginnings in an inner-city slum and a Swansea council estate are far removed from this landscape of the Mabinogion. My artwork, honed by my studies at Swansea School of Art in the 1970s, tends to be more concerned with the cityscape and the people who inhabit it, with a smattering of class politics, for example, my latest work is a series of drawings, screenprints and linocuts inspired by the South Wales Miner’s Wives in the 1984-1985 strike.
However, the ancient peoples spoke to me across the eons. There are many theories of why the stone monuments were created but I see them with an artist’s eye, they are placed beautifully and aesthetically within a specific geographic location.
These drawings and paintings have been in a number of exhibitions and some feature in Dewi Bowen’s book, “Hunting The Wild Megalith” and Melvyn William’s film of the same name. To see them reinterpreted in glass by Deanne Mangold is thrilling.
scribblah 