Bethan Huws: In Conversation

About

Join artist Bethan Huws in conversation with Phoebe Roberts, Curator of The Artangel Collection as they discuss Huws work ‘Singing for the Sea’ and her wider artistic practice.

Currently on display at the Gymnasium Gallery in Berwick-upon-Tweed, ‘Singing for the Sea’ documents ‘A Work for the North Sea’ by Bethan Huws and the Bistritsa Babi, performed at Sugar Sands, Longhoughton in Northumberland. For the performance Huws invited the Bistritsa Babi one of Bulgaria’s finest groups of traditional singers, to sing at the edge of the North Sea over three evenings in late July 1993. Pitched into the wind, the haunting melodies of the Bulgarian women combine with the rumbling of the sea to create a unique polyphony of sound and voice. 

Bethan Huws work spans drawing, sculpture, film and installation and it often has a strong focus on language and communication. She is interested in subtly altering our experience of spaces to create sites for contemplation to make unexpected links to our experiences of daily life. ‘Singing for the Sea’ in particular exemplifies Huws’s primary interests in language, memory, and the specificities of place.

Huws has held solo exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery, London, Museum Serralves, Porto, Portugal, Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland and The Henry Moore Foundation, Leeds.

In 2009, Huws was commissioned by Turner Contemporary to make a new film and two new text installations on the Margate Seafront. Huws won the BACA Europe 2006 award given by the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht and represented Wales at the Venice Biennale in 2003.