Segrgrair

About

Paul Eastwood works across text, sculpture, performance, video, drawing, printmaking and textiles. He is primarily concerned with how objects and people occupy architectural space and the built environment, and how objects have the potential to communicate cultural identity.

Segrgrair follows a research project exploring what message/stories Welsh speakers would chose to leave for future generations if the Welsh language was to become extinct in a hundred years and to identify the cultural signifiers of Wales. The project had particular focus on Welsh identity within Welsh crafts and cultural artefacts, questioning whether Welshness could reside within objects. A further research trip, to Chandigarh, explored the city Le Corbusier designed for an independent India. This research project grew out of the desire to study how we are governed by the buildings we occupy and how architecture can suggest the aspirations of cultural identity.

The exhibition will feature a wall-mounted neon and video installation exploring a vision of a museum carved into the mountain. The museum will be portrayed in a state of ruin and the cultural objects it once housed are broken or have eroded, leaving only the mountains carved interiors intact. The accompanying monologue imagines a language with consciousness of its own; an entity separate from a human vessel. Through the work, language becomes a character, devoid of a human body, which resides within the walls of this fictional mountain architecture as a disembodied voice discussing how language is used to record culture for posterity and its shortcoming in retaining significant information that expands upon its origins, history and ability to identify visual culture.

The title Segrgrair is an obsolete Welsh 14th Century word that is believed to have several possible meanings, among them are beautiful relic and holy relic.

Eastwood (b. 1985, Wrexham) obtained a postgraduate diploma from Royal Academy Schools in 2014, having previously studied Painting at Wimbledon School of Art. Recent exhibitions include The Bear Pit, Focal Point Gallery, Southend (2015); Feast of Fools, TAP, Southend (2016); Sunday Art fair, London (2015); Annexinema, Bloc Projects, Sheffield & g39, Cardiff (2015); Graphics Interchange Format, Focal Point Gallery, Southend (2015); Touching | Paul Eastwood & Max Prus, Kennington Residency, London (2014); Royal Academy Schools Show (2014).

PERICLO is a platform for risk and experimentation in contemporary visual art. During Oriel Wrecsam's transitional period - moving from its home of over 40 years at Wrexham Library to an exciting new cultural development in Wrexham People's Market which will open in 2018 - PERICLO forms one exhibition strand with other peripatetic projects taking place across the town centre and beyond.

PERICLO is an Oriel Wrecsam exhibition programme supported by Wrexham County Borough Council, Arts Council Wales, Welsh Government and the National Lottery.