Dialogue

Blue Colander, Gaudy Jug and Welsh Kettle, Shani Rhys James

We are excited to bring you this CELF exhibition featuring botanical themed work from the national collection alongside contemporary responses from artists across Wales.

With artworks from Amgueddfa Cymru / The National Museum of Wales featuring Augustus John, Vanessa Bell, Matthew Smith, Evan Walters, Maurice de Vlaminck.

With contemporary responses from Shani Rhys James, Sue Hunt, Jeanette Orrell, Eleri Mills, Catrin Davies, Ann Thomas and Anya Paintsil.

Artist Biographies

Shani Rhys James

Shani Rhys James won the prestigious Jerwood Painting Prize in 2003 and was made an M.B.E. in 2006 for services to Welsh Art.

Shani Rhys James was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1953. Her father was a Welsh surgeon and her mother was an Australian actor and artist. She arrived in UK in 1963 with her mother. She attended Parliament Hill Girls School and trained as an artist at Loughborough School of Art and St Martins School of Art receiving a BA honours in Painting (1976). She married the artist Stephen West in 1977 and they have 2 sons.

​Initially she lived in Whitechapel and had a studio at Butlers Wharf near Tower Bridge. She moved with her family to a derelict farm in Mid-Wales in 1984, converting the barns into studios. She began exhibiting in Wales and at the RA in London, winning the Aberystwyth Open in 1992, the Mostyn Open, the Gold Medal at the National Eisteddfod, the Hunting Observer Art Prize (1993) and second prize at the BP National Portrait Award. She was BBC Wales Visual Artist of the Year 1994.

​She exhibited in the 90s in important touring exhibitions such as Disclosure(s) from Oriel Mostyn and one-person exhibitions Blood Ties from Wrexham Arts Centre, Facing the Self from Oriel Mostyn and The Black Cot from Aberystwyth Arts Centre.

​A Creative Wales award from the Arts Council of Wales in 2006 enabled her to realize a long-held ambition to make sculptural automata, kinetic and sound-based versions of childhood memories of the theatre her parents ran in Australia. A further award in 2013 led to the creation of Florilingua, an installation of paint, sound and video collaborating with seven contemporary poets, which formed the centerpiece for her one-person touring exhibition The Rivalry of Flowers showing in Kings Place London, Northumbria University and the organising venue, Aberystwyth Arts Centre.

​Two monographs have been published on the artist, The Black Cot Gomer Press 2004 and Rivalry of Flowers Seren Press 2013. A major survey of 30 years work 'Distillation' opened at the National Library of Wales and Cassandra’s Rant at Ceredigion Museum, both in Aberystwyth in 2015 and in the same year Rhys James was artist-in-residence at Columbia University New York. Rhys James received an Honorary Fellowship from Wrexham Glyndŵr University in 2017.

​In 2020 ‘Tea on the sofa, Blood on the carpet’ was shown before the Covid-19 lockdown in the Wolfson Gallery at Charleston Trust and she showed two drawings in ‘Dear Christine’ at Arthouse1 in Bermondsey. Also in 2020 works inspired by Bocaccio were part of Flowers on-line show ‘Decameron Re-visited’.

​She was represented by Martin Tinney Gallery in Cardiff from 1992 to 2023 and has been represented by Connaught Brown in Albemarle Street London since 2009, where work made under lockdown was exhibited in ‘Hunan-Ynysu: Self Island’ in 2021. A selected survey of 50 years work was shown in 2023. She continues to work in her studios in Wales and France. Her new show ‘States of Mind’ opened at Connaught Brown in May 2024.

Sue Hunt

"Although it changes and adapts over time my work is based around botanically-inspired form combined with paint as a subject within itself. I don’t endeavour to imitate nature, but to make work inspired by it, and through this, to communicate something of the spirit of life force coming into being.

Subject matter is often revealed through play and exploration of the materials themselves, be it paint, silverpoint drawing, etching, or film. My focus lies in a rigor of drawing when needed, combined with a strong abstract identity in terms of composition: this, and a fascination with the subtle energy of botanical forms and motifs, has underpinned my work of late.

The images could be read as an analogy of life: birth, growth, and fading towards extinction, our parallel co-existence within the natural world.

Life can be brief, forceful, transient. These elements I recognize as becoming fundamental to my work, and it is the magnificence and poignancy of this quiet reflection that I wish to communicate."

Jeanette Orrell

Jeanette Orrell, born in Leigh, Lancashire in 1964. She studied at Camberwell School of Art (1982–1985). After art school she spent time in London, Japan and Greece before returning to the North West of England, where she worked whilst bringing up her two daughters. She has been living and working in Wales for over 20 years and in 2017, was a recipient of the Arts Council of Wales Creative Wales A ward. Her work weaves together a fine art practice with craft techniques and is informed by understandings of familial ties, nature, making and motherhood.

Eleri Mills

Eleri Mills lives and works in rural Mid Wales, where she was born and brought up. She has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad including the Museums of Modern Art Kyoto and Tokyo, Museu Textil d’Indumentaria, Barcelona and the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid.

In 2010 she won the Arts Council of Wales’ Creative Wales Ambassador award followed by a three month residency in New York at Columbia University and a showing at SOFA NYC (the international art fair for Sculpture, Objects and Functional Art) at Park Avenue Armory.

Eleri has exhibited with Ruthin Craft Centre at Collect, the international art fair organised by the Crafts Council, firstly from 2004 to 2008 at the Victoria and Albert Museum and most recently in 2017 and 2018 at London’s Saatchi Gallery.

Her work is featured in national collections which include the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh and the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Catrin Davies

My work usually starts with a drawing that evolves within various disciplines such as collage and video. Narrative is often quite central to the work and I sometimes refer to narrative found within painting history.

I am originally from Tregaron and the Ceredigion landscape is included in much of my work.

Previous exhibitions include: Agora, Tŷ Penarth, Penarth; Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain, g39, Cardiff; External Machines, Royal Standard, Liverpool; Whistling in the Dark: Kings Artist Run Initiative, Melbourne.

Ann Thomas

Ann studied Zoology and taught in Secondary Schools before becoming a lecturer in Plas Tan Y Bwlch, the Snowdonia National Park Study Centre for 20 years.
She studied Printmaking at Union College, Schenectady U.S.A 1989- 1990 and subsequently used her field nature sketches to produce etchings, monotypes and linoleum prints.

Adventures abroad have led to exhibitions and an art workshop in the Vega Archipelago, Norway situated on the edge of the Arctic Circle. In 2019 She was commissioned to write and illustrate a book of Vega Wild flowers (Vega ‘Wild Wonderful Plants, ‘Ville Vaker Vekster’) for the island’s new World Heritage Centre. In contrast to these mountainous northern islands, she has enjoyed the wide horizons of the Hortobágy National Park a protected World Heritage Site, situated in the Great Hungarian Plain. She exhibited works to promote awareness and interest in the wildlife and heritage of the Hortobágy in 2016. Nearer home – Dolgellau – Ann has produced monotypes and thermofax prints of wooden carved animals in Brithdir Church, a CADW listed church linked to the Arts and Crafts movement.

Ann exhibits with The North Wales Watercolour and Fine Artists Society and has contributed to a book by the founding member of the Society, Margaret Stevens, ’An Introduction to Drawing Flowers’, Quintet Press 1995.

Anya Paintsil

Anya Paintsil is a Welsh and Ghanaian textile artist who lives and works in London and Glyn Ceiriog. Drawing inspiration from her childhood in North Wales, and her ancestral, Fante tradition of figurative textiles, Paintsil combines craft practices she was taught as a young child; rug making, appliqué and hand embroidery with afro hairstyling techniques to create large scale portraits. Paintsils’ figures explore the possibilities and politics of non representative depictions of the Black figure.

Often mistaken as subversion of ‘primitivism’, Paintsil deliberately and consciously refuses to root her work in the European Fine Art Canon, Paintsil’s visual language finds its basis in traditional West African Crafts and Art - carvings, wood sculptures, masks - exchanging the hard materials for soft, in an interrogation of gendered labour, particularly the labour of working class women.

Anya made her debut at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London in 2020, and since then Anya has received sustained interest from private collectors and public institutions. Recent acquisitions include Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The National Museum of Wales, The Whitworth Gallery, Manchester and The Women’s Art Collection at Cambridge University

CELF brings the national collection of contemporary art to communities across Wales. We are a partnership network that draws on local interest and stories to foster pathways for engaging with Wales’ art collection.