Opening tonight (Friday, May 1), at 7 pm, 'Un Funud Fach,' an exhibition of installation, animation, music and painting by Sarah and Tim Williams (pictured).
Sarah Williams (nee Young) is a renowned Welsh painter and her husband Tim is one of Wales' most innovative songwriters and musicians.
Their first collaboration was on the couple's 'Lost Birds' album, produced by Mason Neely (who has also worked with Cerys Matthews and Paper Aeroplanes), and released in 2014 to great critical acclaim.
Tim encouraged Sarah to sing on record for the first time and her stunning art work was a feature of the CD's cover.
"We wanted to make a little film to go with one of the songs on 'Lost Birds'," explained Tim, "that's how it all started. Then I thought it would be brilliant to have a rolling background and worked out how to do it with a camera in the middle of a 360 degree panorama. Then I built a round studio to accommodate it, and we loved making it as much as the installation itself. The problem then was how to bring it to the gallery. Luckily I found a portable circular swimming pool which was perfect to fit it in."
The wooden round studio sitting on stilts, or shed as Tim refers to it, is indeed a work of art itself, and in it he and Sarah built the panorama - beautifully crafted by Tim (he is also a wordworker) and painted by Sarah, a couple of feet high, replete with scenes from Pembrokeshire life - a wedding outside a chapel, protestors outside Pembroke catcracker plant, the Irish ferry and so on - which have now been painstakingly transferred to the serendipitously found swimming pool beneath and are the basis of the images in the short film.
"We did things a bit back to front," added Sarah, "we did the visuals first then taped conversations of people talking about their lives. The core of it is Pembrokeshire, but we wanted it to be more than just about the landscape, we wanted it to be about the people as well, giving voice to people who would not normally be heard. You connect to a landscape through a story, surreal, random connections, some call it deep mapping. Looking at a place by observing what's beyond the surface is like having a conscience. We see the landscape change so much and want to chronicle it because people are becoming disconnected from nature and their roots."
This amazing installation, and the film, words, and music that go with it create a fantastic exhibition, along with the paintings which will be for sale, and will be open 10 am - 5 pm, Wednesdays to Saturdays until June 6.





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