The Welsh Group | 8 Shows: Witness

8 Shows: Witness

Andy Warhol said ‘Voyeurism is a director’s job description. It’s an artist’s too.’ This online exhibition shows work where observing happens through digital media and images existing in the digital world.

The four artists in this show are working with technology to explore ideas that can’t easily be expressed with physical material, by using the moving image through the lens of a mobile phone camera or animation programmes, or by exploring sculptural forms and drawing using digital rendering – drawing with digital media.

Previously Paul Brewer used processes from early photography to make large scale photographic prints that resemble paintings, however his recent digital airbrush paintings look photographic. Dilys Jackson explores sculptural forms manipulating them to make complex images that only exist on screen'. Karin Mear makes a digital animation to accompany one of her poems and Paul Edwards makes short films, at times an idea realised and at times a visual sketchbook.

The subjects here are sometimes personal and always diverse: images based on the experience of illness and the fashion industry; how culture can flourish in the home, out of the gallery; the rituals of engagement and marriage; and the shapes and forms of pollens seen through an electron microscope.

The connection between art and technology is an interesting one. Changes in art practice have often been driven by technical innovation. At the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Bill Goldston said – ‘Artists never really leave anything alone. If you give them a tool it’s going to get used.’

There will be a live screening of Witness on

Friday, January 17th, 2025,

7.00pm,

Grange Pavilion
Grange Gardens
Cardiff CF11 7LJ

Paul Brewer

I worked from the same studio in Cardiff for over thirty years. It was not just a place of work but housed the equipment used to produce my hand-made photographic prints.

I had constructed colour and black and white darkrooms, a walk-in-size camera obscura, and a projector enlarger capable of producing an image 16’x12’ on a vacuum bed attached to the end wall. This equipment was use to produce portrait hand-made photographic prints using the nineteenth century process of cyanotype and gum bichromate.

We moved to Fishguard after Christine had been discharged from the oncology unit at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital

A transition period followed. Now without a studio for the first time in over 40 years I had to reinvent myself. You never start from the beginning again, but recommence somewhere along the track, so I began to work digitally, using one of the two first floor rooms in our house as a studio. Whereas my bichromate prints look like paintings, yet they are photographs, ironically my digital work looks photographic, but they are in fact drawn, using a form of digital airbrush painting.

The choice of subject matter for the digital work is loosely based upon Christine, breast cancer and superficial fashion photography.

Paul Brewer - films

We all live on our cell phones

Guardian Angel

Paul Edwards

Home Movies
I’ve always drawn in sketchbooks and around ten years ago I started to use my phone as another kind of sketchbook. I use my phone to record things I see in the world that seem for one reason or another to be extraordinary, to explore subjects that can’t be drawing or painting, but like drawing and painting my phone allows me to make work about seeing.

Indoors
Culture is irrepressible. It thrives behind doors, in our private spaces, in living rooms, in kitchens, in homes, whether that’s Tai Chi in a flat in Ely or poetry in a council flat in Cross Keys or Canton. These short films take the pulse of cultural life behind the doors of ordinary houses.
A world away: Zhiwen Zhou practicing Tai Chi, a connection with Chinese culture in Ely. Amy Wack, a poet from California who sees with words.

A different world: Dennis Edwards, celebrating his hundredth birthday this year, still driven to write poetry. Ninetyfour- year-old Iris Edwards playing piano every day since she was a girl in Gorseinon.

Outdoors
I have been painting and drawing in the landscape now for very nearly thirty years. I am interested in the way it changes minute by minute, the way nothing is constant – the intensity of the light varies, the wind moves, the temperature changes. Though painting can imply movement, air and atmosphere, it cannot represent this directly, but film allows me to make the ephemeral nature of landscape my subject.

Paul Edwards - films

Iris Edwards

Amy Wack

Denis and Viv Edwards

Zhiwen Zhou

Dilys Jackson

An aspect of pollen that is intriguing to me is that individual pollens are invisible to the naked eye, so their forms exist normally in a sphere invisible to us, in a secret world, and yet through the technology of the electron microscope and the work of sculptors, their nature can be made visible and even tangible.
Their spikes, protuberances, hollows and cavities form shapes that are both strange and familiar. They are often reminiscent of forms such as may be found in seeds, fruit, human body structures, and even of the forms of man-made objects. They are the essence of life.

I enjoy the excitement of exploring the electronic world of the computer to make my virtual objects and then, as an extra, to use special technologies to turn them into tangible, 'printed' 3D sculptures. These works were 3D printed through the support of Professor Emeritus Keith Brown of Manchester University.

Dilys Jackson - slide show

Karin Mear

I have been creating digital art and stop frame animation for over fifteen years.

My piece, The Bride was inspired by a Welsh woman, Sarah Jane Rees 1839 - 1916. Her first claim to fame was as a master mariner. She persuaded her sea captain father to take her on board ship and she eventually gained her master mariner's certificate - an incredible achievement for a woman in those times.

In 1865 she became the first woman to win a poetry prize at the National Eisteddfod, writing under the name of Cranogwen. Her winning poem, Y Fodrwy Briodasol (The Wedding Ring) was a satire on a married woman's destiny.

My poem, The Bride, was inspired by Y Fodrwy Briodasol. My choice of words and imagery are often metaphorical, with a nod to Sarah Jane Rees' life as a master mariner's and like her, my poem is satirical, indicating the restricted life that lay ahead for most women in mid nineteenth century Wales.

Karin Mear - film

Black Spiked Pollen Form 3D print

Golden Spiked Pollen Form abs plastic

The Bride 1

The Bride 2

The Bride 3