Glasfryn Project

The catalogue for Penny Hallas’ major exhibition, ‘Sighting’, at Elysium Gallery, Swansea, February/March 2026

Sighting focuses on five recent projects, each of which explores, in its own deceptively playful way, certain basic questions regarding the nature of perception and understanding. How do we make sense of the world around us, and how does the world make sense of us? Who owns the meanings we find there and how do we challenge them when they become harmful or restrictive?

At the heart of Hallas’ oeuvre is a fascination with the richness and complexity of the ways by which human beings manifest their forms of being in the world. Her work is discomfiting sometimes because she never shies away from the darker aspects of psychological phenomena and the role of the unconscious in the construction and reception of such phenomena. For Hallas the human psyche is an unpredictable and sometimes dangerous organism projecting its own desires and confusions onto the world around it and her art reflects that whilst looking out beyond it to the potentialities of the imagination and its capacity for empathy, care, reparation for damage. This is not an art of concepts, of philosophical positioning or research (although there are elements of all those in the mixture), so much as a full-on physical, intellectual and emotional engagement with the tangled realities of a place and a human situation, and of the social and individual forces which have shaped and marked it. It is an art full of wonder, alive with improvisatory urges, strange, jarring, funny, and often magically beautiful.

Published February 2026. Uk £5.00

Aquifer Books

ISBN: 978-1-0684861-2-8

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View all: Aquifer | Posted on 9 Feb 2026 | Comments Off on Penny Hallas: ‘Sighting’ Exhibition Catalogue