29/09/2016
CURIOUS TRAVELLERS: MOVEMENT, LANDSCAPE, ART
Oriel Sycharth, 10 October – 16 December 2016
Exhibition exploring responses to travel in North Wales over 250 years
“I beg to be considered not as a Topographer but as a curious traveller willing
to collect all that a traveller may be supposed to do in his voyage; I am the first
that attempted travels at home, therefore earnestly wish for accuracy.”
Thomas Pennant, May 1773.
This exhibition presents a range of responses to the writings of the Flintshire travel writer Thomas Pennant (1726-1798), whose Tours of both Wales and Scotland ignited public interest in the ‘peripheries’ of Britain. A diverse and exciting range of contemporary Welsh artists, working in various media from paint and etching to film and sound, revisit and reimagine Pennant’s words and places from C21st perspectives.
‘Curious Travellers: Movement, Landscape, Art’ is linked to a major AHRC-funded research project run by the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies and Glasgow University. The project opens a window onto the vivid and often entertaining accounts of the visitors who headed for the edges of the British Isles in search of the primitive, the picturesque and the sublime – and often found the foreign, and the unsettling, surprisingly close to home.
This exhibition is accompanied by a series of events (including poetry readings, artists’ talks, and a storytelling evening) all held within the gallery. Free to attend.
www.curioustravellers.ac.uk