Grid Drawing

South Wales 2014 is not the same as South Wales 1974, 1984 etc. Different times. Different landscapes. Different versions of the country. Heavy industry has always required large scale installations characterized by a purely functional architecture devoid of aesthetic concerns. Everything is connected and operated towards a specific purpose. The mine is a vast machine for extracting raw materials from the Earth. The steelworks is a vast machine for processing iron ore. In South Wales there were mines and steelworks and factories all over the country, employing thousands of people. It is a history documented in photographs, drawings, paintings and written accounts. It is a history that is often talked about. These are fragments, evidence that a different version of the country that existed before the one we occupy today (a past that was wiped away to make way for the present). Some physical traces survive, fragments of vast industrial machines left in forgotten corners when the industries migrated to other countries. Industrial complexes were disassembled and cleared, leaving behind occasional debris like jigsaw pieces that offer hints of a larger, lost image. Stripped of all relevant contexts, the work of the imagination is to determine / decode the previous function of the physical traces of heavy industry that haunt so many cleared grounds across South Wales. It is work that leads to documentation; to research into historical evidence and the creation of new documents. The current exhibition is the result of an effort to capture something of the strange otherness of industrial remains and the emotions they inspire. As fragments of a whole that no longer exists, there is a haunting quality to an encounter with physical evidence of a once busy, dangerous and restricted environment. Each encounter is a reminder that nothing is fixed or static or secure, that although traces remain they are only fragments of something much larger that has been cleared away. The work in the exhibition employs drawing and photography to acknowledge that, stripped of their intended function and historical context, there can be no definitive statement on the remnants of industrial installations. Instead, each fragment must be carefully considered and re-considered from different perspectives, in different media, to communicate its simultaneously fixed and elusive nature and unlock a haunted, tragic sense of time passing. Kenneth Trayner www.