Photography / “Wild Blue Yonder” by PhotoAccess members; “Up In The Air” by Claire Grant and “Sky Eternal” by Cat Wilson. At Huw Davies Gallery, until July 30. Reviewed by CON BOEKEL.

AS Caitlin Seymour-King pointed out in her introductory speech at Huw Davies Gallery, whatever else art may be about, it is still about colour.

The colour blue links these three exhibitions.

In “Wild Blue Yonder”, some of the members have taken artistic licence to heart and have managed to avoid blue altogether, focusing instead on the yonder. Some of the blues and some of the yonders are imaginative indeed. There is technical exploration. There are elegant finished works. There are also examples of works which are way stations in larger bodies of practice.

This exhibition is a satisfying example of the artistic community at work.

In “Sky Eternal” Wilson exhibits a video with music composed by Jamie Saxe. The video shows slowly evolving cloud formations in a blue sky. The picture space is cut in half with the bottom half reflecting exactly the top half.

Wilson’s ambition is large. To quote from Marian Devitt’s exhibition essay: this “…work mediates on the ways in which the universal and timeless sky unites us all, a metaphor for innovation, positivity, hope and heaven.”

Somewhere between the launch throng and a hard wooden bench, heaven eluded me. That said, the clouds and sounds do have a hypnotic quality as well as the sort of soothing emotional impact generated by the slow-rail journey genre. The visuals and the sounds provide a pleasing synthesis. The music leaks into the other two exhibitions, providing a unifying acoustic ambience.

The serenity of Wilson’s work is in stark contrast to that of Claire Grant.

When Claire Grant was both a flight attendant and an artist she found time to point an iPhone out of a plane window, and to take series of photos. The plane provided a moving viewpoint.

“Domestic Travel Restrictions May Be in Place (nothing as precious as a hole in the ground)” dominates Grant’s exhibition. It consists of a collation of 57 sheets. Vertically, the picture frame falls from the roof of the sky to the bottom of an open cut mine pit. Laterally, it moves from the outback country side, over a large open-cut mine, and thence over a flat riverine plain.

Grant printed the iPhone images as cyanotypes. The paper sheets were salvaged from the business of commercial flight: crew and pilot schedules and reports. At times the iPhone failed to cope with the plane’s movement thus creating occasional glitches. The use of actual work sheets, the sometimes random outcomes of the cyanotype process, and the iPhone glitches create a deep documentary integrity.

This is a serious and impressive work.

On the end wall, Grant exhibits a cyanotype print of an X-ray of her teeth. When she began work as a flight attendant the airline wanted this record in case she was in a plane that crashed and burned. The teeth might be all that remained for identification purposes.

Grant’s exhibition also features a series of porthole vignettes of airport departure boards with row upon row of flight cancellation notices. Traceries of imagined landscapes provide footers.

Grant presents her exhibition as a self-portrait. It is not even remotely a self-portrait that Rembrandt would recognise. But it works. It is highly creative. We get a sense of the gritty workplace realities of being a flight attendant. We get a flight attendant’s eagle-eye view of a landscape. Grant fuses feelings, vistas, materials and techniques wonderfully well.

Exhibition launch speaker Stephen Payne observed that the works evoked in him an ongoing sense of disturbance about covid. It has not gone away. It is still causing chaos in once routine air journeys and in much else besides.

I do long for a time when I can write a covid-free exhibition review. Alas!

If you have the covid blues, I suggest you drop into the Huw Davies Gallery and enjoy these three exhibitions.