Penny Hallas
September 2024
Thanks to Arts Council Wales and National Lottery, Penny Hallas will be spending most of September on a residency with Manchester’s Rogue Artists’ Studios, linking in with Company Chameleon, and is keen to make contact with studio artists. A key residency question will be the role of video in collaborative live performance and live performance in video.
Now living and working in the Black Mountains, Wales, she was born and raised in Leeds and studied visual art in Wakefield and at University of Wales, and Art Therapy in Birmingham. Whilst drawing is at the heart of her practice, she uses video, projection, photography, painting, performance and sculptural elements, often in the form of found objects.
Whatever the media used, her work revolves around a fascination with the exchanges between internal and external states of being. Alive to the promptings of chance, fantasy and emotion, it seeks out correspondences between the hidden crannies of the psyche and the material world, with its different systems – agricultural, industrial, ecological, natural, artistic: exploring how these come into being, collide, become enmeshed and fall apart under pressure of natural, psychological or more socially determined forces.
In recent years these concerns have led to large-scale drawing in the form of Myrioramas. Penny Hallas uses but subverts the Myriorama’s idealised picturesque aesthetic, combining and intermingling narratives, deliberately introducing elements of dissonance and misfit as a way of extending conversations about how we perceive and value the land in a time of environmental crisis. These drawings have often formed the basis of immersive audio-visual environments, providing a setting for her own video and performances to camera as well as collaborative live performances with poets, performers and musicians.
Collaborative approaches are integral to her practice: she welcomes the disturbance, challenge and enrichment of multiple perspectives. Sources/theoretical underpinnings include: art historical interrogations of landscape: art psychotherapy/systemic psychotherapy frameworks: archive material, poetry, myth and ritual.
Penny has exhibited widely, mainly in Wales but also Germany, Belgium, Canada, USA: but equally important are opportunities to be part of experimental live art events and improvised performance – in arts venues and in settings such as the extensive Llangattock cave system near her studio. Penny will be the first Wales-based artist to take up the Rogue residency. As well as offering her the chance for on-the-job training and development and connections with artists and performers in the Manchester area, the residency offers exciting opportunities to foster stronger relationships between Rogue Artists’ Studios, Company Chameleon and Wales arts organisations and communities. Warm thanks to Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Elysium Gallery and Studios and PEAKcymru for their involvement and support.