Lee Williams: Cargo
Preview: Friday 18th June, 7pm
Exhibition continues until 16th July
Open Wednesday – Saturday 12-5pm
Admission Free
Artist Talk, Saturday 16th July, 2pm
This project is situated within the debate revolving around art, industry and ecology, specifically focusing on the relationship between industry and coastal area of Aberavon, Port Talbot. Port Talbot is major steel producing town with one of the deepest harbor’s in the world but also has a community which is highly dependent on the steel industry.
CARGO is also concerned with the relationship with industrialization and ecology, considering the coastal area as an arena for discourse. Port Talbot is a heavily polluted area with measured air levels of particulate matter PM10 in the town reaching as high as 9 on the government’s air pollution scale and it also has some of the highest sea acidity level in Wales. This is a local version of bigger and broader issues.
Recent research has explored place attachment and the bonding of people to places, relating attachment to constructs such as place identity, sense of place and place dependence. Our relationship to our environment is complex, one unself-consciously and self-consciously accepts and recognizes place as integral to our personal and communal identity and self-worth. Places and human interaction are a reciprocal processes in the sense that, through place interaction, people actively engage with place. People come to feel part of a place and associate personal and group identity with the identity of that place.
Lee has been a visual artist, curator and lecturer for over 25 years and has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad. He studied at South Glamorgan Inst. of H.E., Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Goldsmiths University and the University of Wales, Newport. In 2014 he was the main prize winner at Beep Wales International Painting Prize. He is currently course leader for the foundation diploma at Neath Port Talbot College Group and is a director of Colony Projects a South Wales based artist led organisation. Lee also has a solo exhibition coming up at ARCADECARDIFF Gallery later this year.