BILLBOARD GALLERY
Our Billboard Gallery brings art outside the gallery walls. Located on the side of our building, it overlooks Cwmbran Centre and Glyndwr car park.
It was installed in July 2022 through funding from the Arts Council of Wales Cultural Recovery Fund.
CURRENT ARTWORK
PALMSTONES
Sophie Mak-Schram
Palmstones was created by artist Sophie Mak-Schram in conversation with our arts and health groups, about ideas of holding. From who and what we hold onto, to holding as a support structure, as a means of reassurance, or as a grasp, together, they looked at the roles objects play in strengthening, soothing, and connecting us.
Sophie joined and led sessions with our weekly Create with Confidence and Living with Dementia groups, exploring ideas around holding through sharing objects and their stories. These became the starting point for experimenting with sculpting and pattern making, drawing loosely on different cultural practices of sharing objects with kin and different types of scaffolding and support structures.
Palmstones combines details, photographs, and scans of the objects and session outcomes, with images from Sophie’s ongoing collection of water videos, and light fittings from our building – which were installed back in 1999 and replaced in April 2026. The words, hand, held, hold, connect to other ideas of support and wellbeing, reflecting both our approach as an organisation, the community and atmosphere we nurture through the arts and health programme, and the ways in which objects can cross time and hold histories of care.
By layering these objects and patterns together through digital collage, Sophie has brought together different people’s supports into a single image. By presenting it in our Billboard Gallery these supports extend out, beyond our building, offering others something to hold onto.
Sophie worked with our groups throughout April and May 2026 and will be returning for some final sessions later in the year.
There will be an opening in the gallery on Saturday 13 June, 12-2pm, and the Billboard will be on display until Spring 2027.
Before the opening, Sophie will be giving a short Artist Talk at 11.00am in Gallery 2. Book a free place here.
This is part of Llantarnam Grange 60, a year-long celebration of 60 years of creativity in Cwmbran. Funded by the Colwinston Charitable Trust.
SOPHIE MAK-SCHRAM
Sophie is an artist who works with others to create place-specific work around power, collectivity, knowledges and futures. This work is informed by personal and shared experiences of cultural difference, coloniality, race and gender.
Often using the metaphor of the ‘tool’ – as a poetic and practical object – Sophie works with collaborators to make tools that can shift power, gather groups and offer ways of being in relation (to each other, to place, to institutions) differently. A tool might be an access rider, a radical safeguarding protocol or a collectively written welcome text, or it might be a ceramic you can touch in the context of a look-don’t-touch museum, a megaphone, or a surreal cushion.
Recent projects include To Shift a Stone (2025-2026), commissioned by Amgueddfa Cymru and Chapter Arts Centre and Stretching Thresholds, Holding Streams (2024-2025) in collaboration with Jeanne van Heeswijk, commissioned by Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Switzerland.
PAST ARTWORK
MMMM NOTE
Kerstin Kartscher and Sadia Pineda Hameed
MMMM NOTE was created by artists Sadia Pineda Hameed and Kerstin Kartscher to reimagine material representations of value.
Developed after research at the Robert Owen Museum in Newtown, MMMM NOTE acts as a speculative voucher from a future, where value is measured through irrational, ‘delirious’ modes of intuition, belief and conjuring.
This artwork was on display from May 2025 – April 2026.
Find out more here.
CYMRAEG DDRWG
Ffion Williams
Cymraeg Ddrwg was created by artist Ffion Williams that explores Welshness, protest, and hope. Through using Cymraeg (Welsh language) to explore identity and cultural belonging, Ffion experiments and plays with language, layering text and using their own method of creative translation.
“When using Welsh I make mistakes, miss mutations, and substitute English words to make my point. I call this Cymraeg Ddrwg (bad Welsh). Through this, I embrace language as an evolving tool for creation.” – Ffion Williams
This artwork was on display from May 2024 – April 2025.
Find out more here.
DANCING OUTSIDE OPENS THE ROAD
Adéọlá Dewis and Catriona Abuneke
Dancing Outside Opens the Road was created by artist Adéọlá Dewi and photographer Catriona Abuneke for our Billboard Gallery in 2022.
Inspired by Cwmbran’s history of farming and its connections to the tin industry, this piece drew parallels to elements of the Yoruba deity Ogun, the West African god of iron, metal and metal work.
Find out more here
