Category: Blog

An exhibition celebrating 10 years of the Jane Phillips Award

08 October – 13 November 2021

Location: Mission Gallery, Swansea

Launched at Mission Gallery in 2011, the Jane Phillips Award is a memorial to Jane Phillips (1957-2011) Mission Gallery’s first director. The award is intended as a legacy to Jane’s passion for mentoring and nurturing talent, working with individuals at every level – offering opportunities to students as well as artists at the beginning of their journey. Opportunities that are further strengthened by working with Mission Gallery’s team, Swansea College of Art UWTSD and elysium gallery.

The award became international under Amanda Roderick, Mission Gallery’s previous director, and with further assistance by following directors Matthew Otten and Ceri Jones, plus an enthusiastic board, the award is constantly developing and changing.

This exhibition celebrates the success and accomplishments of the previous ten years. It may only be a small group of artists here, but they’ve all experienced the award in different ways – from residencies, studio spaces, graduate showcases, curatorial projects or exhibitions.

Exhibition Artists:

Thibault Brunet | Jason & Becky | Helen Dennis | Laura Edmonds | Harry Gammer-Flitcroft | Ryan Moule | Brett Swenson

The Maker: Elin Hughes

The Screen: Laurentina Miksys

The Wall: Owain Sparnon

Image: Harry Gammer-Flitcroft

Although the exhibition is now at an end, here are a few images of the work at Mission Gallery.

To read a conversation between Louise Hobson and Emma Geliot please visit CCQ Magazine.

A review by Rory Duckhouse for ‘this is tomorrow’ magazine can be found here. Images by Matthew Otten.

the […] space and Offsite @ National Waterfront Museum | Jonathan Arndell and Dafydd Williams

05 April – 08 May 2016

Following Jonathan’s Swansea International Festival Residency at the Jane Phillips Award Studio at Elysium High Street Studios last year, the work developed can now be seen at both Mission Gallery and the National Waterfront Museum.

Jonathan uses found objects to explore ideas around abandonment and the consequent gradual disintegration of human-made environments and artefacts. His work as an architect over 40 years has involved the re-invention of existing buildings for new uses. He has often had to explore buildings that have been empty for many years and is fascinated by the ‘stuff’ that people have chosen to leave behind when vacating these spaces.

Jonathan’s response to the SIF takes this aspect of his work and uses it to explore the nature of barriers to the appreciation of ‘high art’ and asks: ‘Why is it so difficult to engage a greater cross-section of our community in the festival?’

In collaboration with Jonathan Arndell, photographer and artist Dafydd Williams, a 3rd year Photography in the Arts student studying at UWTSD, Swansea, has created a series of images that speak of trace; what once was, and what we leave behind.

Curated by Louise Hobson | Jane Phillips Award Curatorial Residency

19 March – 09 April 2016

Louise Hobson’s curated exhibiton at Mission Gallery is fast approaching, information on events and the artists can be found below:

ARTIST TALK: Saturday 19 March, 4pm

PUBLIC PREVIEW: Saturday 19 March, 6-8pm

CLOSING EVENT: Saturday 9th April, 12-3pm 

The actions that led to the making of this exhibition include: inviting, researching, funding, mentoring, collecting, questioning, doubting, choosing, emailing, chatting, travelling, visiting, explaining, persuading, budgeting, collaborating, facilitating, printing, distributing, communicating, redrafting, coordinating, responding, compromising, adapting, transporting, curating.

Catherine Biocca, Cornelia Baltes, Rosalie Schweiker is presented at Mission Gallery as part of the Jane Phillips Award Curatorial Residency, a new opportunity within the Jane Phillips Award, supporting early career curatorial development.

Catherine Biocca’s installations form trajectories into alternate timelines and realities, exchanging the real and the animated world to generate a new, and unfamiliar stage. She approaches her work through the concept of schadenfreude, a German and relatively untranslatable word loosely meaning ‘the joy of someone else’s failure’.

At Mission Gallery, Catherine creates an inside-out environment, transposing a time some millions of years ago into the gallery in a new work titled Deutscher Fürst. Layering cartoon imagery, science fiction and natural history, the artist produces a lo-fi, deconstructed dinosaur landscape. In this new multidimensional installation, Catherine brings us into a dialogue with our assumption of being on time.   In parallel to Deutscher Fürst, 4-handed space drawings from the INTERGALACTIC series will also be exhibited. These new works have been made in collaboration with the artist’s father, a former spacecraft engineer.

Cornelia Baltes’ paintings exist as protagonists, subtly shifting the gallery space into a stage for an abridged visual narrative. Real-world observations inform her works but fall away as gestures are reconsidered, refined, and invested onto her canvases, walls and coloured MDFs, making for rigorously conceived forms imbued with playfulness and humour. At Mission Gallery, Cornelia works directly onto the walls of the gallery, expanding on a recent exploration of making site-specific murals. In this new installation, colour and motifs migrate from the large-scale wall paintings to her framed paintings, escaping the confines of their supports as though both independent and fallen.

Rosalie Schweiker buys a fridge magnet wherever she goes for work. At Mission Gallery, Rosalie presents the migrant worker’s fridge magnet collection; displaying her collection for the first time in public, on a fridge stocked with local drinks. If you buy the artist a drink at the public preview, she’ll tell you the story behind a magnet. After the opening weekend, the fridge will stay on and serve the exhibition as a bar.  Rosalie Schweiker uses social exchanges to find new functions for art in society. Her work often manifests itself in humorous interventions such as sleepovers, pizza portraits, bra shops, confidence building workshops, gardening and other seemingly random activities. Since Rosalie’s focus is on the communicative effects of art, most of her work leaves hardly any material trace.

Including contributions from Maria Guggenbichler, San Keller, Madeleine Amsler, David Morris, Rachel Pafe, Romy Rüegger, Peter Schweiker, Sabine Schweiker, Jo Waterhouse and others.

In March 2015 Louise Hobson was selected as the recipient of the Jane Phillips Award Curatorial Residency, a new opportunity within the Jane Phillips Award that supports early career curatorial development. The residency offered Louise a studio space at Elysium Studios for a month’s research and development; a £500 travel award for overseas research; and a period of three weeks in Mission Gallery’s programming to curate an exhibition.

Within this framework Louise secured funding to travel to New York and act on an invitation from our partners Residency Unlimited, undertaking a month long curatorial residency, and further funding to develop a new exhibition with artists working in and outside of Wales, supported by mentoring from Gavin Wade, Director of Eastside Projects.

Louise sees her role as initiator, approaching the exhibition as a space constructed over time through a cumulative process of collaboration – a layering of conversations, ideas and systems – inviting artists with an open proposition of the gallery space and three weeks. This invitation began with thoughts on temporary and mobile architectures, space and exchange, but in being open to the potential of collaboration, this exhibition could come to exist as many things.

Louise Hobson’s month long residency is now underway at Residency Unlimited, for more information please click here

Jane Phillips Award Curatorial Residency exhibition, curated by Louise Hobson | 19 March – 10 April 2016 | Mission Gallery

“The sun, the fog, the pink, the gold – for me”

4/12/15 – 12/12/15, 12:30 – 5:30 Weds – Sat
Preview Friday 4/12/15 6 – 8pm
In conversation with Keith Bayliss Saturday 5/12/15 1pm

Laura Edmunds, the 2011 Jane Phillips Award recipient, opens a solo show at Arcade Cardiff. The exhibition explores the primacy of existence through drawing.

For more information on Laura’s exhibition please click here