Highlights

Substitutes for bread, 2023 by Kelly Ballett

Substitutes for Bread is the collective name for an ongoing series of salt dough (bread dough preserved with salt) sculpture in the form of Fasces, an ancient symbol of power and jurisdiction, later adopted as the emblem of the Italian Fascist Party. These Fasces are variations of wheatsheaf, bundles and bunches of wheat. They are held by belts, are burnt, billow, collapse in on themselves or constrained, displayed on the floor in clusters. The wheatsheaf masquerades as an object of harvest or labour offering, larping in pastoral idyl, a fetishised display of power and subordination. The salt dough has been kneaded and physically manipulated to take these forms.

Their title comes from the satirical print of James Gillray ‘Substitutes for Bread;–or–Right Honorables, Saving the Loaves, & Dividing the Fishes’ (London 1795) which satirises the greed of the ruling classes in Georgian Britain, and inequalities of the distribution of wealth. Where political policy inflicts physical restrictions and worsening social conditions of Austerity, post-Brexit Britain, the breadline and the price of a loaf of bread also set social standards, with spiralling inflation, cuts to social services, MP expense scandals and cronyistic government contracts, tax-evading and encroachment of policies which act against the social body.

Floating Revolutions, 2023 - 2024 by Johana Hartwig

The urban river acts as a reflection of the changing city. Along its length the banks harden from soil to stone and steel, as the river flows from hill and farm, through the city onwards to industrial estate and edge-lands.  With this in mind our social, economic and political landscapes cast their shadows across it’s surface as the by-products of daily life are washed-up on it’s banks and flow it’s length on this journey.

The work made on this project references the floating vegetable gardens in lowland South-Central Bangladesh, that rise and fall with the swelling waters, as a blueprint for possible future living in South Wales.

Materials were collected by boat with support from Cardiff Harbour Authority and Bottega Project.

Wayfaring/Lines and Interior Spaces : Materials of movement and attention, 2024 - 2025 by Russell Moreton

Processual clay+ceramic constructions that articulate through processes of mark making and intermediaries, surfaces spatial bodies and interiors all entangled in a complex scaffolding of its own making.

https://russellmoreton.blogspot.com

"Makers work in a world that does not stand still

Iteration allows for continual correction (material conversation) in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of the task as it unfolds, mixing the potential for blending or combining matter that already exists into new combinations"

Tim Ingold, 2010.

Vanity, 2024 by Olivia Irvine

Crystal objects are laid on a folding vanity table. This painting is oil and distemper.

56 x 51cm