Exhibition // Arddangosfa:
REBUILD the POETS

4 October - 13 December 2025

City Road at Night, Athena Jones, 2022

g39 are really proud to re-present works from Sam Aldridge, Adéọlá Dewis, Sean Edwards, Heledd C Evans, Athena Jones, Tamara Krikorian, Jon Pountney + J. Brookes, Jeffrey Steele + Katrina Blannin, Wendy Short in an exhibition and programme of activities, re-performances, re-introductions and replicas of artists work spanning several generations.

The show gets its title from a placard that appeared on fencing after a local pub, The Poets Corner, that stood near Shelley Walk and Shakespeare Street, was demolished in 2016 to make way for redevelopment. Over the last decade g39 has been testing assumptions of how we view development and success. Rebuild the Poets reflects our idea that progress is not a straight line between the past and now, but more of a scribble, unpredictable and connecting at multiple points.

A consumer ideal that fetishises newness over content often means that things that should be noticed slip by. Without nostalgia, we hope to bring some of these works to light – to slow down production and revisit important artists at significant moments in their practice.

Rebuild the Poets, we have since discovered, was a placard by poet and activist J. Brookes - remade and replaced every time contractors removed it in a small act of defiance. Thanks to photographer and artist Jon Pountney for the use of his photograph of the sign in-situ. The plot of land, like a lot of City Road, is currently being redeveloped.

Highlighting disappearing landmarks and memories of growing up in Cardiff, Athena Jones’ painting City Road at Night is of a building earmarked for demolition. Renovated multiple times the distinctive domed façade has been a bowling alley, a bar, a bingo hall - but originally in 1912 it opened as the Gaiety Electric Theatre with its own custom-built pipe-organ accompanying silent films.

In Spring 2023 composer and artist Heledd C Evans was part of a project with Ty Cerdd and Theatr SOAR in Merthyr Tydfil, creating new work for the theatre’s restored mechanical organ. As part of the exhibition, a recording of the composition played by Huw Morgan will fill the gallery once an hour.

Elsewhere in the exhibition we have brought works back to the public. Sean Edwards’ sculpture Photocopied Staedtler Noris HB Pencil was made when he graduated in Cardiff in 2003 - an elaborate process of sanding and photocopying an exact facsimile of a pencil replaces the depleted original. Adéọlá Dewis recovers the fragments of her first performance and exhibition in Wales, Out of the Frame at g39 in 2005. And we are able to re-screen Patsy, by Wendy Short, a film about time, mortality and generational change that was made for g39’s Jerwood UNITe programme in 2021 but was all but eclipsed by lockdown restrictions.

We are also re-showing Tamara Krikorian, known across Wales as director of Cywaith Cymru, whose library partly formed the basis of ours at g39. In Rebuild the Poets we are showing some of her pioneering moving image works of the late 1970s, designed to interrupt the flow of TV broadcasting.

The exhibition includes an original silkscreen-printed billboard, DOMENICO by Jeffrey Steele, last seen pasted up on sites across Wales in 1967 commissioned by the Welsh Arts Council under the leadership of Peter Jones. Jones authored a series of such projects, mixing high and low culture to reflect Wales’ own democratic traditions, as distinct from the then restrictive outlook of the Arts Council of Great Britain. We are able to present this with the help of Steele’s collaborator and friend Katrina Blannin who is showing a series of prints, DOMENICA, that respond to the original.

At the centre of this exhibition is some of Sam Aldridge’s archive, including his project Modernist Movement. In the exhibition is our replica of his scaled-replica of Barbara Hepworth’s 1968 sculpture Three Obliques (Walk In), which is permanently sited outside Cardiff University. In 2012 in partnership with EMP projects as part of Cardiff Contemporary he moved his lightweight version across the city, making and un-making the structure at different sites, including g39. Sam was a remarkable artist who we had worked with over several years with a lively and constantly evolving sense of play. We are pleased to represent this work alongside maquettes and plans and drawings, as well as his work with the BRG collective presented together for the first time.

Rebuild the Poets is not the complete list of things that we feel should be noticed, but it shows a particular selection of work from the last few decades brought together at g39. There are moments of significance, and moments of change and it is noticing these that can help us understand the roles we all play in the story.

Biogs:
Sam Aldridge b. Yeoville (1986-2016) graduated in Cardiff in 2008, his sculptural work used lo-fi construction techniques to replicate everyday objects. Sam exhibited at g39 as well as offsite at Halle 14 in Leipzig. He was a member of the group BRG (British Racing Green).

Adéọlá Dewis (1977-) is an artist and researcher from Trinidad, based in Wales since 2003. Interested in folk and indigenous cultural performances, her work explores our expressions of identity and belonging in the diaspora. Adéọlá is an artist in the government collection and also recently presented the TV series Vanishing Wales.

Sean Edwards (1980-) lives and works in Cardiff and in 2019 represented Wales at the 58th Venice Biennale. He helped shape the g39 artists development programme after graduating and currently works as Programme Director for Fine Art & Photography at Cardiff School of Art and Design.

Heledd C Evans b. Banbury (1997-) is an artist and musician based in Cardiff, working with sound in site-specific installations and multi-layered soundscapes. She has produced programmes for radio, worked as an Engagement Producer for Artes Mundi and was recently one of the Venice 10 fellows.

Athena Jones b. Cardiff (1973-) studied in Nottingham and Cardiff working primarily in drawing and painting. She has recently been part of the BEEP painting prize, exhibited in Juxtaposed at Cyfarthfa Castle and was part of the Drawing Show at Bridewell Gallery Liverpool.

Tamara Krikorian (1944-2009) was one of the first women in the UK to work with video-art. She instigated conferences, artforums and authored key moving-image texts. She co-founded London Video Artists and organised the first video art show in Scotland at Third Eye, Glasgow in 1976. Since the 1980s Tamara championed artists' practice in Wales as director of Cywaith Cymru/Artworks Wales.

Jon Pountney b. Warwickshire (1978-) is a photographer and artist, living in Treforest. His work is inspired by memory, nostalgia, social history and community and primarily uses film and digital photography within his projects. He is passionate about working with communities and people, to bring stories to life and out into the public realm.

J. Brookes b.London (1951-) is a poet based in Cardiff. He graduated from the University of Ulster in 1981. He was the editor of The Yellow Crane poetry magazine 1995-2005. His collection Hymns Ancient & Modern was published by Parthian in 2019.

Jeffrey Steele b. Cardiff (1931-1921) into a working class family in the Splott area. In 1948 he went to Cardiff Art School but left in 1950 after a disagreement to cycle daily to Newport instead. Spending time in London and Paris he returned to Wales in 1960. He was an active participant of the Barry Summer School and organised the Systeemi group exhibition in Helsinki. As a Marxist he presented lectures on theoretical and political aspects of art as head of fine art at Portsmouth Art College until 1988.

Katrina Blannin b.London (1963-) graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1997 she has shown her work extensively in the UK and abroad, co-directed artist run project spaces, curated exhibitions and written about contemporary painting. In 2021 she completed a Painting by Practice PhD at the University of Worcester. She teaches at UAL Camberwell; UCA Canterbury and works both on the editorial board and the mentoring programme for Turps Banana She is represented by Galerie Edition/Hoffmann and Laurent Delaye.

Wendy Short b. Ayrshire (1979-) works to understand how we make sense of the past, the present and our connections with one another. Through field recordings and the moving image, Wendy explores the passage of time, the historical uses of site and meaning attached to place. With an MA in Experimental Filmmaking and as well as Painting and Art History she has made films about The Jocelyn Herbert Archive and vocalist Ingrid Plum. She has had screenings in the UK and Berlin.

The following Artists were in this show: