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Venue Details
About Plas Bodfa
Plas Bodfa is a currently empty 100-year-old manor house on the Isle of Anglesey in North Wales. The house has been a family home, a steak house, a residential care home, headquarters to a tapestry kit company and a tearoom. It then stood empty for more than a decade, waiting for its next life. This came in the form of Jonathan Lewis and artist Julie Upmeyer, who saw the house and grounds as a natural home for their life, family, work, businesses and creative projects. Inspired by the complex process of planning permissions (and unable to resist doing SOMETHING with a huge empty house) Julie initiated a series of investigative projects and large-scale exhibitions exploring the many ‘possibilities of a house’.
Past Projects
Sui Generis – April 2019
67 projects from 66 creatives and collaborative groups filled the entirety of Plas Bodfa. This remarkably multi-disciplinary group art exhibition explored the idea of ‘sui generis’, a Latin phrase meaning "of its (his, her, their) own kind; in a class by itself; unique”. It has been adopted by the legal profession for unusual buildings, properties that fall outside normal designation.
What are the possibilities of a house? With performance and painting, collage and ceramics, skateboarding and singing, poetry and polyrhythmic drumming, fairytales and photography, games and gramophones, sculpture and storytelling, re-enactments and a retroscope, this exhibition was a unique opportunity to fill the currently vacant 36 room / 1,000 sqm space with creative acts, before complete renovation began.
Over 1,400 visitors attended the show!
https://www.plasbodfa.com/sui-generis
‘Order and Disorder’ by John Smith
‘Pimp my Hearth’ by Janina Holloway
The Sound Book Project Performance
‘Parteong / Basged’ by Veronica Calarco
‘Taking Back Control’ by Michael Prince
‘Quite Frankley – revisioning Petrarch’s poetry’ by Peter Hughes
Sui Generis overview
‘Memorialising Disease’ by Helen Birnbaum
Unus Multorum – 2020
Our plans for a second, even larger exhibition were radically altered. The planned exhibition installation week fatefully coincided with the beginning of the first lockdown. However shaken, we persevered. Unus Multorum (loosely translated as ‘one of many’) became an evolved exhibition, unleashed by the global pandemic, with art projects, installations, performances and artist multiples from 111 creatives. There were virtual tours, online talks, creative documentation, mail art, games, phone calls, conversations. We ‘exhibited’ in ways we never thought possible.
This page is one possible way to gather together the multitude of interactions, artworks, connections and events that happened under the loose umbrella that was and is ‘Unus Multorum’. For how does one document something that never started, nor has actually finished, but most definitely happened?
https://www.plasbodfa.com/unus-multorum-2020
‘Up, Down’ by Janina Holloway
‘Membrane II, III, IV and V’ by Sian Hughes
‘Opposites: the Baren and the Biodiverse’ by Julie Jones
‘Ambiguity Above the Familiar’ by Charlie Parker
‘Resonance’ by Sally Fairclough and Adele Kettlewell
‘The Colours of a House – The Plas Bodfa Pogment Collection’ by Angela Strigner and Nicky Perrin
‘Farewell’ by Pat Arnao
‘Slow Music’ by Jonathan Lewis
‘Celestial Blue’ by Debbie Budenberg
‘Starting the work is two thirds of it’ Liz von Graevenitz
Current Projects
Succession
Entangle yourself in a naturally occurring process – a project of observation and conversation, inspired by and possible within lockdown.
https://www.plasbodfa.com/succession
Plas Bodfa Residency
In the future, our residency programs will focus on creativity, learning and cross-disciplinary investigation. We will involve artists, academics, scientists, educators, musicians, writers, mathematicians and all manner of thinkers, makers and doers.
We will offer several different models of residencies:
1) radically cross-disciplinary retreats for learning and exchange around a specific theme
2) custom residencies developed within the context of specific, collaborative projects
3) local ‘artist-laureate’ program with deeper, long-term, non-residential involvement
Currently, in this ‘pre-renovation’ period, guests working on a particular project at Plas Bodfa can stay on site in our VIP, two bedroom static caravan.
Future Projects
We are working towards a third and final large house-wide takeover exhibition in 2022. This show will be a mix of contemporary art, historical research, oral histories and documentation, real and imaged, inspired by Plas Bodfa itself.
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