Artist and writer Iwan Bala has a multi-disciplinary approach to his practice, involving wall hung painting and drawing, assemblages and site-specific three dimensional work.
He is a founder member of The Artists’ Project, a member of the Beca group and has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad and participated in several international site-specific art events. He has published numerous books, articles and essays on contemporary art in Wales, as well as presenting and researching television programmes, lecturing, and managing public art projects and organising and curating exhibitions. He is now senior Lecturer at the School of Creative Arts and Humanities, Trinity College, Carmarthen.
Group Exhibitions include 'A Propos Ceri Richards' at the National Museum and Gallery of Wales, curated by Mike Tooby (2003-04); Welsh Painting for the 21st Century at the Mall Galleries, London: 'Wales; Unofficial Version' at the House of Croatian Artists, Zagreb curated by Alex Farquarson; 'Myth and Modernity', Welsh painting exhibited in Hong Kong; 'Strata', site-specific work, Strata Florida, Wales and Kells, Ireland (2006) curated by Dr Anne Price-Owen.
Works are held in many public and private collections including the National Museum and Gallery of Wales (Derek Williams Trust), the Contemporary Art Society for Wales, Newport Museum and Art Gallery, Brecknock Museum, Y Tabernacl (Museum of Modern Art, Wales) A Fundacion Casa Museo "A Solaina" de Pilono, Galicia, Spain, The University of Glamorgan and The National Library of Wales. He won the Gold Medal for Fine Art at the National Eisteddfod of Wales in 1997.
Publications include 'Certain Welsh Artists', (ed) Seren (1999) and 'here+now' Seren (2005), 'Groundbreaking. The Artist in the Changing Landscape' (ed) Seren (2005) and 'Hon, Ynys y Galon' Gomer (2007).
QUOTES :
Whilst (Peter) Lord is the inspired ‘excavator’ of Welsh art history, others, most obviously artist Iwan Bala, can be seen as radical ‘curators’ and exponents of current movements and trends. Bala has proposed what he sees as a uniquely Welsh form of ‘custodial aesthetics’: an approach to practising art that engages both with international trends and with deeply-rooted Welsh symbols and ciphers. Such a confluence of the international and the local can be seen in Bala’s own work – in his witty, post-modern take on the Welsh costume, for example, or in his re-mappings of the ‘island’ of Wales as a distinct and independent entity..
Words and Pictures editorial by Francesca Rhydderch. New Welsh Review. Issue 71 Spring 2006.
Ararat/Gwales is an ‘end-game’, in which ragged bits of cloth, debris from abandoned or failing myths are here struck together, to suggest the possibility of a new, integrated life. In this array, Noah’s ark is a postage stamp, glued near Mount Ararat’s summit. The mountain doubles as the torso of a naked giantess who is also the artist’s wife. Her drawn up knees are the two Arenig peaks that look down on a Llyn Tegid in which her feet and buttocks are submerged. This gross female is ‘Ceridwen rising’ or Mam Cymru, Mother Wales, about to give oceanic birth to fresh imaginings..
Michael Dames. Taliesin’s Travels Heart of Albion Press 2006.
"As well as painting he creates installation, sculpture, print and assemblages, collaborating with the theatre director Ed Thomas, putting on drama in the exhibition space, and organising international exchanges, for his view is not simply narrowly nationalistic but sympathetic to all minorities. His work as an artist is inseparable from his activism, forming a seamless whole with his writing and lecturing, while by brilliant positioning he has established an influential and important role for himself and his ideas. Simultaneously, he has pushed the boundaries of acceptability in subject matter, taste and in the means of making images. For this artist, the word is essential as he constructs an eclectic visual 'agitprop' that asks the complacent Welsh to rethink their identity, history and cultural iconography".
Osi Rhys Osmond. Imaging the Imagination . Gwasg Gomer. 2005
Iwan Bala is a positive and dynamic figure in Welsh culture. He has exhibited internationally, been involved in numerous cross-media collaborations and is founder member of The Artists' Project/Prosiect Artistiaid .
Celebrating Arts and Partnership. The Second Annual Conference of The Arts Council of Wales. May 12, 2004.
Bala's concerns with the locality of Wales, a locus historical, cultural and topographical, are exemplary and salutary. They are concerns that will come to be seen as central to a new kind of philosophical and artistic modernism, an inter-national spirit that rejoices in diversity and is grounded in optimism and hope, and which stands up to the culture of the megalopolis.
Mel Gooding. Foreword to here + now, 2003
I first met Iwan Bala in late summer 1998, some two months after I had started working in Wales. I sat in his Cardiff studio and he talked, with characteristic clarity and eloquence, of the sources and meanings of his work. He spoke of Wales - of the country's myths and realities and the inevitable conflation of these in our minds. He spoke also of his eager acceptance of other cultures and his irrepressible curiosity that resulted in an eclectic gathering of visual symbols and ideas from countries such as Zimbabwe and Cuba; a restless collecting to add to his 'common bank of memory and culture'.
Amanda Farr. Director Oriel Davies, foreword to Offerings + Reinventions. 2000.
In his writing, Iwan Bala does not claim to represent a closed agenda, but one that seeks to provoke and engage - and we know from his art that this is indeed the case.
Michael Tooby. Director, National Museum & Gallery of Wales, Cardiff. Offerings + Reinventions. 2000.
In his symbolic landscapes of the 80's distraught male figures struggled and took desperate flight in flimsy boats. They marked his first steps in dealing with the upheaval felt by a modern Welshman when his roots in a rural culture and a mythic past were confronted by a multicultural, urban and evolving society. His pictures gained in dignity when he painted monumental symbolic landscapes based on his experiences of visiting the ruins of Masvingo in Zimbabwe. He found that certain symbols could be used to refer to a specific culture and to universal experiences. He appropriated the ladder, the double headed Janus, the cauldron of re-birth, the strips of terraced houses, the slumbering female landscape, the serpentine rivers and the rows of stick figures that speckle the land like conifers. They all became an integral part of his visual vocabulary. He realised the power of words and used them in his paintings, with double meanings and in several languages. He rediscovered the myths of drowned lands, of shapes shifted and passed on from generation to generation to have their forms renewed and their meanings altered. He used them all to invent a Wales that slipped between the past, the present and the future and offered an increasingly sophisticated manner of using visual art to challenge preconceptions and to enter into debate.
Shelagh Hourahane. Artist and Critic. Domestic Deities. Offerings + Reinventions. 2000.