A Centre of Art – Swansea 2 The Glynn Vivian Art Gallery

Posted on 04/09/201803/09/2018 by Alastair

Last week I took a day to walk around some of the art currently showing in Swansea. The city is teeming with it – all sorts both international and local. For many years now the arts scene in Swansea has been good but in recent years it has been growing even stronger. So I will be posting each day this week with a different aspect of the work we enjoyed on our tour from one gallery to the next.

We started at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery where N. S. Harsha had his largest exhibition in the UK to date. He was winner of the Artes Mundi prize in 2008 and one of the works was an installation made for the Glynn Vivian. The whole exhibition was impressive and the installation was powerful in its use of mirrors – I became one of the people painted on the floor looking up at the mirrored ceiling. It has a strange and disorientating effect.Continue reading→

A Centre of Art – Swansea 1 Festival of Stitch

Posted on 03/09/201801/09/2018 by Alastair

As a tapestry artist and weaver I was keen to see as much as I could of the second biennial Swansea Festival of Stitch 2018 and managed to get to several of the city wide venues. My first port of call was Swansea Museum where some of the best quilting was to be seen.

The first four photos below are from the museum with others being from the Waterfront Museum, the Leisure Centre and the Grand Theatre. The festival is over now but there is much more art to look at in Swansea and I will be doing so over the rest of this week.

Dorothy Russell

Judy Stephens

Margaret Ramsey

Judy Fairless

Old quilt at Swansea Festival of Stitch

One piece quilt at Swansea Festival of Stitch

Fun quilt at Swansea Festival of Stitch

Swansea Festival of Stitch

Jay Warner at Swansea Festival of Stitch

Paula Hitchings at Swansea Festival of Stitch

Sheila Jones at Swansea Festival of Stitch

Dumfries 3 – Sound and Weave

Posted on 31/08/201827/08/2018 by Alastair

The most important reason for me to visit Dumfries was to check out Gracefield Arts Centre and the space in which I would have work in an exhibition later in the year. The British Tapestry Group exhibition “Sound and Weave” is now on at the arts centre and runs there until 29th September.

My tapestry is experimentally interactive with light sensors embedded in the weave – the sensors trigger different field recordings layered over a looping background soundscape when they are cast into shadow by, for instance, the viewer’s hand or body.

“Experimental” is the key work here and it proved a challenge to calibrate the sensors to react at their optimum in a space with lighting quite different from my studio. In this instance I am happy for the interactivity of the tapestry to be sensitive to the changing ambient light as much as the gallery lighting and human intervention, but in future venues I will provide my own lighting with a view to a tighter control of the sensors.

INTERCONNECTION – interactive woven tapestry by Alastair Duncan

The videos below show both my own tapestry “in action” and the other works in the exhibition. Thanks again to Dawn, the Arts Officer at Gracefield, and all the BTG people involved in setting up the exhibition. It will be my turn when it comes to Swansea in March 2019!

If the videos do not show below in your browser, please click the links below to view them on Vimeo.

INTERCONNECTION at Gracefield Arts Centre

https://vimeo.com/285860378

Sound and Weave at Gracefield Arts Centre

https://vimeo.com/286544845

Dumfries 2 – River Nith

Posted on 29/08/201824/08/2018 by Alastair

The River Nith in Dumfries, Scotland, is a fabulous river to watch in the sunshine as the excited water tumbles and tangles over the weir.

The river is tidal and before the weir was built a greater length of it was affected by both high and low tides, meaning any business that relied on its flow was beholden to the actions of sun and moon twice every 24 hours.

The weir may not be needed nowadays for trade purposes but it stillContinue reading→

Dumfries 1 – Camera Obscura

Posted on 27/08/201824/08/2018 by Alastair

While in Scotland in June I both wanted and needed to visit Dumfries. I wanted to go there in order to visit the Camera Obscura I had so often heard about throughout my life. My father had seen it when a boy living in Dumfries and I thought it was about time I did too.

Dumfries is an attractive town on a sunny day and one of its enjoyable features is the River Nith – but more about that in my next post. The camera obscura is a fascinating contraption housed in what used to be a windmill. It is this fact that influenced the design andContinue reading→

Fauna Findings 3 in Scotland – Feeding Frenzy

Posted on 24/08/201818/08/2018 by Alastair

A feeding frenzy of young swallows was one of the most impressive dramas of our stay on the South West coast of Scotland last month. The young birds were fledging and the aerobatics the parents performed to catch insects in flight for their offspring was utterly amazing. Time and time again they would wheel and dive and change direction so abruptly you would think they would leave their brains behind, let alone their stomachs.

These aerobatics went on for a day or two and then the young ones took to the sky and there was even more drama as their parents fed them on the wing andContinue reading→

Fauna Findings 2 in Scotland – Wildlife

Posted on 22/08/201818/08/2018 by Alastair

We spotted a wide range of wildlife during the hot weather in Scotland last month with multiple spotting of deer in the fields and on the beach, a pair of pheasants calling to each other regularly, an adder crossing a hot footpath, many different birds (even more than usual), and a couple of field mice under the hedge came out each evening to share the food put out for the birds.

As well as the images I have selected below, we also witnessed dramatic but unsuccessful chases by weasels of small rabbits – one of them ended right at my feet! On hearingContinue reading→

Fauna Findings 1 in Scotland – Birds on the Shore

Posted on 20/08/201818/08/2018 by Alastair

Like this solitary crow, I enjoy my solitary walks, but this is far from the only species of fauna I found when in Scotland last month. I approached it quietly to try and get a closer shot but was spotted, naturally, and it it took to the air, flying across the bay to meet its partner.

There is a quiet bay, an old disused harbour, along the shore from us where the gulls and oystercatchers – and on this occasion, swans – gather and sit quietly on the water or by its edge andContinue reading→