Viewing Thursday 3 March 2016, 17.30 – 20.00
Exhibition runs until Saturday 2 April 2016
Making marks by hand – Gwilym Hughes –Â also featuring works by Fred Jones and Sue Mclaren
Drawing is the main focus of my work.
My subject is human character – sometimes directly observed but often filtered through history, cliche and projection – I am interested in the things in the head of the viewer, which are not necessarily attributes of the subject. Mystery (can you ever really know another person?) and, inevitably, mortality are underlying themes.
My preferred medium is the woodcut, using mainly discarded pieces of old wood which have their own story to tell, or repurposed furniture.
Lost Voices is a collection of work that reflects my interest in music and words that were never recorded and are now beyond living memory.
Flamenco Faces. Paco de Lucena, one of the most influential guitarists of the nineteenth century, was born after the invention of photography but died before the advent of proper sound recording. The series considers the contrasting images of flamenco in the popular imagination of the 1960s, the spontaneous gypsy lifestyle of Manitas de Plata and the more polished showbiz image of Sabicas.
Chance Meetings. As far as I know, none of these couples ever met or had any real connection. My conception of them is as a cast of characters, alive in my imagination. Buster Keaton takes a walk on Ostend’s blustery beach with James Ensor… how does the conversation go?
Gwilym Hughes is an award-winning print-maker whose recent work has been exhibited at the Bankside Gallery London, RK Burt Gallery London, Manchester Contemporary Art Fair, Warrington Art Gallery and the Awagami International Print Exhibition in Japan. He is currently artist-in-residence at Hot Bed Press in Salford.