- Venue
- Oriel Wrecsam
- Location
- Wales
This exhibition followed on from my own at Oriel Wrecsam. It was really interesting to see how the space, although fundamentally the same now looks so different. I like the work of both Tim Davies and Iwan Bala although I'm not quite sure about seeing them together. The exhibiton was good but I felt that there was something unsettling about the juxtaposition of two such different artists. The exhibition has been brought together under the idea of responses to Liverpool as part of the City of Culture banner waving event. Wrexham is just under an hour from Liverpool so…
Anyway, some of the work in this exhibition has been specially commissioned. It is really interesting to see two such different responses from Welsh artists, both based in South Wales. Iwan Bala was brought up in North Wales and as he says in the exhibition Liverpool was the City- once sited as "Capitol of Wales". Iwan Bala has explored some of the mixed feelings he has for the city. His work looks very immediate and quickly executed, a flow of emotional, visual and written ideas. The best pieces by him in this exhibition are three mixed media pieces which incorporate collaged photographs and drawings of Welsh women in traditional national costume. They explore a link with the city, of a relative, who was a housekeeper there. The connections with Wales particularly from the 1930s-1960s were so strong that chapels and Welsh streets existed in the city. Many a fisherman's son from Nefyn or Benllech came to the port to work on the ships. Unfortunately in the 70s and 80s a loss of identity crept in with the globalisation and inherent Englishness and the Welshness waned. Some of the streets and chapels remain, but the communities have changed. Wales is now a confident European Country with its own Assembly Government. While it is interesting to think about the politcs of the past I'm not sure how relevant it is to the me, as a Welsh man brought up in Northwest england in the 70s and now living in Wales.
Tim Davies' work, by contrast, has a slowness about it. Hours have been spent painstakingly painting and sanding away the land on either side of bridge postcards. These images are very arresting in a quiet and powerful way. The images allow the viewer to contemplate on ideas of what do bridges mean? A bridge links two places. If it is destroyed, such as one of the bridges in Mostar in the former Yugoslavia, then it can have seriously damaging effects on commerce, morale, families and the psychology of place. Some bridges seem to soar into the air and allow us to hover momentarily in the space above and between.There is something eerie and at the same time escapist about bridges floating in space.
Another series of photographic images revisit a previous work shown at the Artes Mundi Prize exhibition in Cardiff. The subject, a bronze statue of a drummer boy, previously appeared in a video with the sound of the static drums playing over the solemn image. Obviously there is a pathos attached to the use of a young boy, sent to war, never to return and this brings to mind the senseless killing of young men and women all over the world in conflict. The digital prints shown here have been pierced with fine controlled holes which, randomly placed, suggest the damage wrought by shrapnel. Tim Davies has found a related war memorial, by the same sculptor, in Liverpool thus linking both his work past and present, and place Wales and Liverpool. Tim Davies is also showing two video works in this show.
