Dylan Huw and Owain Train McGilvary: gwactod*

Public Preview: Friday 2nd October, 6-8pm
Aberystwyth School of Art


gwactod* is a new body of work building on previous collaborative projects by Owain Train McGilvary and Dylan Huw. The exhibition is structured around holes: as gaze, as technology, and as motif, speaking to the spectral presence of empty, and emptied, spaces in Wales’ self-image and the history of its (moving) image culture.

Photographic albums by Angus McBean and Keith Vaughan from the School of Art Museum and Galleries collections at Aberystwyth University, will be shown alongside the artists’ 30-minute film, Fel gwacter (2024), originally commissioned by Mostyn and LUX. These visually rich documents of past homosocial leisure correspond with materials accumulated and exchanged by McGilvary and Huw, cut up and dispersed throughout the gallery space, unsettling received documentary histories through an unruly queer lens. Bringing together moving image, collage and spatial interventions, gwactod* considers how narratives and languages might be connected, boring holes in history and collaging bodies across time.

The installation also reflects on both artists’ recent encounters in Italy – McGilvary in residence at the British School at Rome, and Huw jointly representing Wales at the 61st Venice Biennale – drawing these experiences into dialogue with McBean’s trips in Italy with his partner David Ball in the 1950s. These archival encounters deepen Fel gwacter’s methodologies and lines of enquiry, constellating imagined and impossible (queer) (Welsh) pasts into composite counter-archives we can touch, feel, breathe.

The exhibition is curated by Naomi Pearce.