We are delighted to be able to show Eleri’s work at Twenty Twenty for the first time; a solo exhibition of paintings and drawings by this internationally established Welsh artist.

To view the exhibition catalogue click here.

What is real and what is imagined is a strange conundrum. The real is supposedly what is in front of us, while the imagined can mean many things. Something remembered, a recollection, a reconstructed thought encapsulating a moment in time, a transient vision. However sometimes the imagined is the more truthful. Eleri Mills constructs a subtle collusion between the real and imagined, she nails the essence of it. A conversation betwixt reality and dream, a reinvention of the world and how she sees it in her minds’ eye.

Reveries; perhaps the landscape William Shakespeare called Arden. The borderlands of the Marches where Wales and England slip and slide into each other have a transience that Shakespeare would have been familiar with. Places of magic and intrigue, dreamlands where hills and woodland have a sense of wildness and passion.

Eleri has visited this duality many times and in many different ways. In recent works inspired by India she depicts a different and more highly coloured landscape. Exotic yet tranquil, with a very different colour palette and a quality of light that is otherworldly. But maybe not so far from Arden. Landscape and our place in it is a long-standing dialogue
between the real and the imagined, its depiction has obsessed creative people for millennia. As Eleri states ‘it is the power of the landscape …and the power of Art’.

Philip Hughes MBE
Director, Ruthin Craft Centre

Also in the exhibition : Sculpture and ceramics by Halima Cassell, Jo Sweeting and Gail Altschuler.