Iwan Bala – författare

An unique volume includes contributions by Glynn Vivian's Curator and Exhibitions Officer Karen MacKinnon and Katy Freer respectively; a substantial Curatorial Essay and Exhibition Overview by Dr Zehra Jumabhoy, Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Bristol, as well as Image-led Essays by seminal Pakistani art historian, Professor...

With iconographic zeal, Iwan Bala shifts his hallmark imagery onto a new three dimensional level with the exhibition and book, Offerings + Reinventions. In a typically forthright and self-revelatory essay he traces his artistic development, acknowledges crucial international influences from Zimbabwean sculpture to the Cuban Santeria tradition and expands on the theory of Custodial Aesthetics first expounded in Certan Welsh Artists. Inventive, poetic, politicised, Bala confirms his position as one of the most radical and influential artists working in Wales, combining as he does the mythological inheritance of Wales and other countries with painting and installation.

Tim Davies is one of the most exciting artists working in Britain today. Internationally exhibited and acclaimed he specialises in art which explores identity through artefacts - he has approached Wales through wool, fire, oil-drenched seabird feathers, lead from the roof of a disused chapel. More exotically he has returned a tropical hardwood parquet floor to the Belizean jungle from whence it came, laying the blocks among the trees where new plants now grow through them and termites erode them. Change, organic and by intervention, and method are at the centre of Davies' art; process is its determining feature. In a retrospective approach three leading critics provide an illuminating and informative commentary to his work. David Alston is the Keeper of Art at the Lowry Centre; Iwan Bala is one of Wales' leading artists and critics; Anne Price-Owen is Senior Lecturer in Art at the Swansea Institute. Together they explore the practise, the international context, the Welsh context and the recurring motifs of Tim Davies' work. Davies himself also provides a commentary on five of his significant pieces, and the Foreword is provided by Susan Daniel-McElroy, Director of Tate St Ives. Tim Davies was born in Haverforwest in 1960, and has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, including shows in Australia, Mexico, Hong Kong, Belize, Ireland, Estonia, Poland and Croatia.

The visual arts in Wales are in ferment. The growing fascination in painters, installation artists, sculptors and those working in mixed and electronic media has been reflected both in booming sales and private gallery growth on the one hand and, institutionally, by new public gallery space, a first Welsh pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale and the worldwide Artes Mundi Prize. Here + Now offers a welcome and in depth survey of the visual arts in Wales, addressing as it does the practise of individual artists and the infrastructure in which they work. Here are essays on artists as diverse as established painters Ivor Davies and the late Ernest Zobole, through younger painters like Neal Howells, Elfyn Lewis and Sue Williams, to installation artist David Hastie and the internationally acclaimed performance artist Andre Stitt. Beyond the artist, author Iwan Bala explores what art might mean in Wales and to the Welsh, in essays about the representation of Welsh history and culture in the visual arts. He also discusses the controversial issue of how art is curated in Wales and who decides what the public sees. This stimulating book offers a snapshot of contemporary Welsh art and explores how it functions on the wider stage of world art.