Shelter- Dylan Williams / Enzo Marra / Gareth Griffith / Jenny Wiggins

About

‘The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe

place where we can go as we are and not be questioned’, Maya Angelou

This exhibition explores different interpretations of the concept of shelter- the security it can offer, the safety that it can provide, the home that it can become. Each artist has sensitively responded with painted and sculpted forms to this potent topic. The notion of Shelter/home to an artist often offers more complex considerations- ie seeking a place to be safe and secure along with the potential to be creative and flexible with ones time. Most artists choose to delay domestic security for the freedom to pursue their creative vocation or vice versa, impacting not only the individual but also those closest to them. 

Enzo Marra’s imagery alluding to shelters and homesteads are marked by an immediacy and directness, the explored themes  made visible via instinctively applied linear and blocked out passages, and executed to an intimate scale. The purposely limited palette, allowing the depicted imagery to not be obscured or overtaken by unnecessary frivolous flourishes. 

Much of Dylan Williams’ works is born out of his relationship with the rural South Wales landscape close to where the artist lives, and drawn from a deep connection to the hills, fields and forest he’s navigated throughout his life. Williams’ paintings attempt to summon the meditative nature of the landscape, reducing the expansive freedom and familiarity of the countryside to its essential. Minimal applications of paint consolidate these streams of lived and inherited experiences within the land into calm, muted works that suggest the safety and assurance a well known terrain can provide.

Gareth Griffith has developed a series of tent works from around 2011 which he acknowledges was a turning point in his recent practice. The void of the tent, the need for its sanctuary and the temporary respite that it provides is an image for our times of mass migration crises. A poignant series of blue tent paintings by Gareth hold a reimagining of  events from his childhood; based on a photograph of a tent that the Griffith family used on camping trips during their time living in Jamaica. During one trip, they were attacked, and Gareth very nearly beheaded with a machete- a truly shocking and traumatising event. These works began what has been an ongoing process of, as he describes it, "facing up to the ghosts of my past". He has returned to this experience in numerous works and series over the past decade.

Jenny Wiggins celebrates our hero the Bee in bronze, placing them on pedestals but accepting plants and insects as a given. In her bee works-‘Commemoration’- the artist collected bumble bees that had died in her garden and cast them in bronze placing them on 5 foot high metal poles. The most recent pieces ‘Safe Houses’ are bronze bees enclosed in a lead ‘House’. Lead is toxic, soft enough to bend and mould by hand but very heavy and dense. It has been used for centuries to enclose bodies to protect them from the elements but also to enclose and contain dangerous materials such as uranium. These tiny lead Houses stand on very thin metal pedestals which question the whole idea of safety. 

Dylan Williams 

Dylan Williams b.1995 is a painter based in Swansea. His paintings are unearthed from the Welsh hills where he grew up and drawn from the surroundings on walks, cycles and swims. Deeply concerned with a metaphysical connection to the natural world, his work attempts to fuse transcendental and universal encounters into meditative, calm imagery of the landscape. Dylan studied at Swansea College of Art, and is based at Elysium Gallery Studios, and has shown in group and solo shows across the UK and in the USA and his work is held in private collections across the UK and USA. In 2022 he won the Glynn Vivian award at the BEEP Painting Biennale 

Enzo Marra 

Enzo Marra is a London based painter who has been selected for the John Moores Painting Prize in 2012 and 2016, the Threadneedle Prize in 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2016, and the Creekside Open in 2013, 2015 and 2017, where he was chosen as a prize winner by Jordan Baseman in 2017. He has also been selected for the Beep Painting Biennial in 2014 and 2016, his paintings being highly commended in the 2014 exhibition. 

Gareth Griffith 

Gareth Griffith (b. 1940) grew up in Caernarfon, in North Wales, and has lived a short distance from there in Mynydd Llandygai near Bangor, for over 40 years. He studied at Liverpool College of Art in the early 1960s and spent the majority of his working life as an art teacher. He is represented in the collections of Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales, Walker Art Gallery and The Arts Council Collection and was joint winner of the 2022 BEEP Painting Biennale in Swansea.

Jenny Wiggins 

Jenny Wiggins studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College of Art and lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions include Rogue Plants and Lowly Creatures at Fishlabs Gallery Whitstable 2023, Linden Hall Studio Gallery Deal 2022/23, McPhearson Gallery London 2017, Thames Side Gallery London, Thames Side Gallery 'Modern Makers IV': Sculptures London 2016, Made in Greenwich London 2015, Edinburgh Art Fair Edinburgh 2015, 'Small Memories' Caxon Contemporaries Gallery Whitstable 2009, Chelsea Art Fair 2008. Her work was included in the publication 'On Sublimity and Synaesthesia' Stephen Baycroft and is held in public and private collections.