Pontypool

Evening everyone,

it's been a while since you heard from us, and that's because we've been busy first looking for, and now renovating our new gallery space. As we wrote before, the project will be based in Pontypool, where - thanks to grants from the Arts Council of Wales (Welsh Government and Lottery Funding), Torfaen Arts Development and Pontypool Town Council - we'll organise 9 exhibitions of fine art photography over a period of 11 months, along with collaborative projects organised with artists from Wales and beyond. We're preparing for an opening in the first half of February and we'll have more details soon! For now, have a look at our renovation shots as we convert a former office space into a gallery.

 

 

New Gallery and Projects For 2017!

Afternoon everyone,

We hope that those of you who were celebrating had a wonderful Christmas & New Year, and for those whose Christmas is in a couple days, we hope you have a great time too!

We have some exciting news to share with you regarding our plans for 2017, over the last couple of days we received confirmation that our funding application to the Welsh Arts Council was successful, and along with their support and that of the Torfaen Arts Development Office and Pontypool Town Council, we now have all the funding we need to start a new fine art photography gallery in Pontypool, Wales. As always, our aim is to bring high quality international photography and culture to the Valleys. This year we also have a couple of different (and we hope innovative) types of exhibitions planned for the space - for now we'll keep some of those details under our hat, but we'll be posting more information on the blog and social media as we progress through the year! 

With a bit less renovating than in Bargoed, we hope to have the space up and ready by the end of the month, and we plan to open the first exhibition around the beginning of February - the who and when will be announced closer to the date of opening, so keep your eyes on this blog and facebook for more details! The gallery will be open until December 2017 and we already have 8 other exhibitions waiting to go, plus a couple of workshops and other little things.

Other than the new gallery project, we're also hoping to continue our cooperation with the Market Hall Cinema in Brynmawr, which is sadly closed for the moment due to finding asbestos in the building while they were working on opening their second screen. Being closed for so long is tough for such a small independent cinema, so we hope that those of you locally that are planning to go the cinema will think first of them once they re-open and support the great job that they're doing in Brynmawr!

We also have a couple of other exhibitions planned for the coming year, but they are still being brewed in the attic, so we'll keep you updated - for now remember that you can still see Stephan Vendran's "summer passage" in the New Tredegar White Rose Information and Resource Centre until the 12th of January! The centre is open daily, but it's worth popping over to their website for exact opening times.

​We're really excited to once again be able to share a diverse set of international and Wales-based photographers in an often culturally overlooked and forgotten part of Wales and the UK!

All the best,

Zosia & Dafydd

the*kickplate*project