About
Penny Hallas: Sighting
06/02/2026 – 28/03/2026
Preview: Friday 6th February, 7pm – late
Gallery open Wednesday – Saturday, 11am – 6pm
Online artist talk: Tuesday 17th February, 7pm
Gallery talk: Penny Hallas with Alan Bowring: Deep time, Saturday 21st February 2pm
In ‘Sighting’, Penny Hallas presents a multi-media exhibition which explores the complex nature of our perception and experience of place. A sighting can be something that simply happens to us, punching through our inattention, dismantling our expectations, or it can be a deliberate act of focusing in. Using but subverting traditional techniques and formats, such as the Myriorama, along with home-made, idiosyncratic viewing devices, Penny examines the mechanisms by which we attempt to make sense of the world and to situate ourselves within it. How does a space, in the shape, for instance, of a building, an institution, a landscape, become personal, ‘meaningful’? What do we bring to it and what happens in us when the meanings are usurped or when such places are threatened, damaged or made unavailable? All of which raises social and political questions about power, access and control, and the impact of changing attitudes on social relationships, land and environment but it touches deeply too on our most intimate psychological responses. More ludic than documentary, Penny brings a spirit of play, fantasy, improvisation and mischief to her enquiries, arriving often in the most unexpected places, by means of entirely unexpected paths.
Whatever the media used, Penny Hallas’s work revolves around a fascination with internal states of being alive to the promptings of chance, fantasy and emotion, it seeks out correspondences between the material world and the hidden crannies of the psyche. Based in the Black Mountains, Powys she is interested in the way different systems – agricultural, industrial, ecological, natural, artistic – come into being, collide, become enmeshed and fall apart under pressure of natural, psychological or more socially determined forces.
Collaborative approaches are integral to her practice: whether from artists, performers, audiences, communities or life/earth scientists, she welcomes the enrichment of multiple perspectives and diverse narratives. Sources and theoretical underpinnings come from art historical interrogations of landscape, art psychotherapy/systemic psychotherapy frameworks, archive material, poetry, myth and ritual.
She is a member of Ghost Jam (Glasfryn Project), Sgôr Performance Collective and Space Place Practice artist research hub. Exhibited widely (Wales, UK, Ireland, Barcelona, Berlin, Newfoundland, Finland) she has especially appreciated international opportunities through Elysium Gallery: Beyond Borders travelling exhibition, Reframing the Past >>> Emerging Futures partnership, exchanges and exhibition with International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, Canada and From Here and There cultural exchanges and exhibition co-hosted by Elysium Gallery and Colorado State University, U.S.A.
elysium gallery | 210 High St | Swansea | SA1 1PE www.elysiumgallery.com
Instagram: @elysiumswansea