Penny Hallas

Elysium Gallery, 210 High Street, Swansea SA1 1PE.
Opening event 6 Feb, 7pm. All welcome.
Exhibition continues to 28th March, Weds – Sat 11-6pm

17 Feb 7pm Online artist talk: Tuesday 17th February, 7pm

21 Feb 2pm Gallery talk: Deep Time, with Alan Bowring, Geologist and Fforest Fawr Geopark Development Officer.

In ‘Sighting’, Penny Hallas explores the complex nature of our perception and experience of place. A sighting can be something that simply happens to us, punching through our inattention, dismantling our expectations, or it can be a deliberate act of focusing in. Using but subverting traditional techniques and formats, such as the myriorama, along with home-made, idiosyncratic viewing devices, Penny examines the mechanisms by which we attempt to make sense of the world and to situate ourselves within it. How does a space, in the shape, for instance, of a building, an institution, a landscape, become personal, ‘meaningful’? What do we bring to it and what happens in us when the meanings are usurped or when such places are threatened, damaged or made unavailable? All of which raises social and political questions about power, access and control, and the impact of changing attitudes on social relationships, land and environment but it touches deeply too on our most intimate psychological responses. More ludic than documentary, Penny brings a spirit of play, fantasy, improvisation and mischief to her enquiries, arriving often in the most unexpected places, by means of entirely unexpected paths.

Designed and hand-bound by guest editor Frances Woodley. 19 artists made 20 pages: each artist gets a copy of the finished book, with the last going to Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

Frances’s theme was the prefix ‘Re-’ when used in front of a verb. See her Instagram for more details.

For all 20 of my pages see artwork

With Sgôr at Swansea Performance Weekend 20th November.
Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, 15.30 – 20.00. See poster for details of all events.
@lindersterling
@vrosssmith
@hollyslingsby
@Glynnvivian
@swanseaperformance
@sgor_score

photos (top): Dafydd Williams (below): Pete Evans

A Private Land / Tir Diarffordd has been selected for the ‘Power / Control’ category of the Axis Art Film Festival.
10 Sept, from 7pm

The Film Festival runs from 8-14 September 2025 with seven themed events, showing over 30 short films by artists from across the UK and beyond. Book your place for all the online screenings and events here

A six week summer residency at G39 with SGÔR performance collective culminates in free live performance events.
9 Aug 5-8pm MOSH part 1, G39 Cardiff
21 Aug 6-8pm MOSH part 2, Ffotogallery, Cardiff

SGÔR residency / performers: Beth Greenhalgh, Tess Woof, Tim Martin-Jones, Vivian Ross-Smith, Tessa Waite, Penny Hallas, Abi Hubbard, Robert Oros, Iona Lewis, Pete Evans plus special guests.

For more info see @tactileBosh
Pete Evans

A very special experience to be on this residential programme hosted and devised by PEAK Cymru and
their guest curator, singer and poet Casi Wyn.

Four days in the Black Mountains, July, 2025, focusing on themes of connection, inspired by Casi’s
ideas of language as a tool for rooting into place – whilst uprooting the imagination.. With conversations,
walks and tailored workshops hosted by guest contributors, the programme was held in a multi-lingual
space, led primarily in Welsh.

See https://www.peakcymru.org/pegwn for full details of contributors, participants and the over-arching
metaphor of anastomoses as a system of unexpected patterns, divergencies and connections.

New work showing at West Wharf Gallery, Cardiff CF1 5DB.
March 15 – April 26th. Open Fri & Sat 10am – 5pm
Event 26th April 12-3pm. Free – all welcome.

Concentric is the latest of a long-running series celebrating International Women’s Day, conceived
and curated by Jacqueline Alkema.

Top image: Operative 116. (2020-2025) Oil and oil bar on 5 panels. Total size 80 x 55 cms
Below: Operative 122 (2025) Oil and oil bar on 5 reversible panels (each 15 x 44.5cms)

Using the modernist art aesthetic I was born into; inspired by engineering manuals and diagrams demonstrating systems for the use of resources; responding to vast engineering works I witness in and around the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park, the ‘Operatives’ relate to intermeshed creative and destructive forces.

I am grateful to artist Jane Lawson for this reference: ‘In her 2021 book Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira describes modernity as a worlding story, one that presents itself “as a general project of civilisation that seeks to engineer society through humanism, reason, science, progress, and technology” but that rests on a foundation of violent extraction, exploitation and ecocide that is leading to climate breakdown. We need to enable modernity to die a good death in order for something better to be born, but we will only be able to create something genuinely different if we first become aware and suspicious of what modernity allows us to desire and imagine.’
Jane Lawson. Artist Environmental Lead at Castlefield Gallery and co-ordinator of SPARK Network

GPS Signal Lost is making a new appearance at Oriel Carn, as part of SYMUD, an exhibition of moving image. 07.02.25 – 15.03.25.

7th Feb 7-9pm LAWNSIAD | LAUNCH. Oriel Carn, Castle Ditch, Caernarfon LL55 2AY

GPS System Lost is concerned with observing and recording, over a period of five years, some of the strange interplay between human and natural activity in and around the caves of Craig Y Cilau National Nature Reserve, Mynydd Llangatwg. It is a collage of films and stills, animations and projections in the tunnels of Eglwys Faen, using centuries of graffitti as backdrop. The film also plays as a personal homage to my father, photographer and one-time pot-holer, on whose last camera the material for this film was gathered.
(2016) Duration 10:30 minutes, 16:9 ratio. Soundpiece, Lyndon Davies (2024)

National and International Video/Film artists in collaboration with Barcelona LOOP Festival 2024 and Damer House Gallery, Ireland

Alalimon Galeria presents Homeland 2024 in collaboration with the Culture Association ‘La Bibliomusicineteca’,
Carrer de Vila i Vilà 76, 08004 Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain

14 Nov at 8pm to  20 Dec 2024

Image: cropped still from Maelstrom, a 6 minute video sequence made from collaborative exchanges between
David Bickley, Ireland and Penny Hallas, Wales

For more details see @damerhouseartgallery

Bringing together the work of women artists from Rogue Artists’ Studios, Manchester, alongside 12 selected artists from around the UK.
3 Oct 6-9pm Private View – all welcome 
5 Oct -27 Oct Open Saturdays and Sundays 12-4pm and by appointment during the week. 

Given that my residency at @rogueartists_studios is to focus on video / performance elements in my work, it’s great to have the chance to show a video piece from last year (image 1. A Private Land, 30 mins) which is informing new work in progress in these amazing listed former school buildings (image 2)

Rogue Women 3 is organised and co-curated by Margaret Cahill and Jen Orpin with guest curator Leanne Green head of exhibitions at Tate Liverpool.

Rogue Artists’ Studios CIC, 2 – 6 Barrass Street, Openshaw, Manchester M11 1PU