GALLERY 1
PORTAL 2025
30 AUGUST – 22 NOVEMBER
Portal is our annual group exhibition of graduate artists and makers that aims to demystify working in the arts. By giving new voices support, tools, and the opportunity to develop skills, Portal reaches beyond the gallery walls to give emerging artists the best possible start for forging sustainable careers.
Through a constellation of practices that range from sculpture, ceramics, illustration, jewellery and moving image, Portal 2025 showcases a collection of 15 of this year’s graduates. With artists from Welsh institutions such as Cardiff Met, UWTSD Swansea, and Carmarthen School of Art, to national universities such as University of Edinburgh, Arts University Plymouth, and Slade School of Art. We hope this exhibition captures the collective spirit and ideas coming out of art schools this year.
Ideas surrounding transformation connects the work on display, with artists looking to the natural world, material processes, their imagination, and past memories to consider the ways we grow and persist, and what we can gain and lose in these moments of change.
Through developing relationships with materials that flow and evolve, such as clay and precious metals, chance enters some of the work. While other artists stay firmly in control, deliberately altering, embellishing, or meticulously assembling work through hand-painted motifs, layering paper-cut-outs, and scratching into film.
Escaping into fantasy through immersive worlds offers an alternative space for transformations. Drawing on childhood connections to folklore, myths and legends, characters morph and shift in mystical ways, blurring the boundaries between humans and animals.
Back in reality, transformations can be seen in the world around us. With natural and industrial processes such as cave formations, river erosion, and extracting raw materials altering our landscape in both generative and destructive ways.
Many of these changes result in fragmentation. Whether cracks in our sense of self, partial memories, or loss of language, to the physical sections of a slatted blind or jagged shards of ceramics, the effects of pulling things apart always leaves a mark.
Graduating is always a moment of transformation, and Portal 2025 makes the opportunities and tensions that come with change visible through a collection of work that encourages honest reflection while moving uncertainly into the future.
Featuring work from:
Adam Thomas, Alicia Olejniczak, Alyssa Patrick, Cerys Oliver, Erin Samuels, Gwenllian Davenport, Isobel Robey, Joy Franklin, Julie Doel, Laura Compton, Louise Grey, Madiha Safdar, Rhana Menzies, Rowan Bartlett, Samuel Franks
There will be an opening in the gallery on Saturday 30 August 12-2pm with official opening by Nick Thomas-Symonds MP, and the exhibition will run until the 22 November 2025.
