Notes from Wales Issue 1: Autumn 2014 | Page 19

Finding your place There is a tremendous amount of artist-led activity across Wales, and west Wales has its fair share. Rhôd is a strong regional hub - started in 2009, it is an artist-run project in Drefelin, Carmarthenshire, which seeks to activate an ‘urban-rural dialogue’ from a most stunning rural location - an old mill down a long rambling lane. The low-down Narberth Museum > -----------------Let your hair down artists networking event > ------------------ Artists with studios on the site are part of the wider Rhôd Artist Group, which includes artists invited to make work and exhibit on the site. The project sets out to make the case that work produced outside the city is as distinct and significant as that which comes from within it. There is only a dichotomy of mind between the two. Outside and inside are inversions of one another. Oriel Myrddin Gallery > Colony 14, in collaboration with Elysium Gallery in Swansea, took place again in Cardigan this past August, occupying two beautiful disused warehouse spaces. With over 50 artists participating, it was an ambitious endeavour for the quiet market town and included a diverse and interesting range of work, from established artists like Iwan Bala to emerging talents like Anthony Rhys. Rhôd > Rhys’s strange paintings are the out-takes of old daguerreotypes - the Victorian subjects have been caught laughing or yelling or deeply angry or sad, perhaps hysterical. The images, which could never have been captured by the slow daguerreotype process, are imagined by Rhys’s tiny paintbrushes. These pictures subvert the language of portraiture and reveal instead what we might never see. Installation views of the Colony 14 exhibition, Cardigan, August 2014 -----------------Aberystwyth Arts Centre > -----------------Oriel Mwldan > ------------------ -----------------Colony Projects > -----------------Elysium Gallery > ------------------ Axisweb members David Fitzjohn > Richard Higlett > Linda Norris > Tim Shaw > Alicia Miller, September 2014 NOTES FROM WALES | AUTUMN 2014 18