Exhibition Review: Tess Powell

CJ Wagstaff

Over the weekend of 17–19 July, Unstable Arts in Roath hosted the debut solo exhibition of Tess Powell, a Swansea University MA Creative Writing alumna shortlisted for the 2025 Rhys Davies Prize for her short story ‘Fruits of Our Labour’. Originally from California, Powell studied Fine Art and Animation at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University before moving to Wales in 2023. Modest in scale but generous in range, this show offered a first proper look at her practice in Cardiff.

Powell’s technical skill is obvious in her earlier works, including a run of delicate watercolour nudes that serve as careful studies in light and proportion. She proves just as adept with figures as she is with landscapes, demonstrating a sophisticated grasp of distance and spatial depth. However, the exhibition truly finds its nerve in her later pieces. The acrylic painting “Alone in My Room” features the artist rendered in miniature, curled foetally on a normal-sized bed. As poignant as it is visually satisfying, this piece taps into recognisable sensations without overstating them. It is easy to see why it was selected for the Women Who Create Wales group exhibition at Swansea’s Elysium Gallery earlier this spring.

The standout work, for me, is “Artist Eating”, an acrylic-on-cardboard self-portrait set into a papier-mâché frame. The image is unflinching and unsettling: a nude artist hunched over a kitchen table, an apple raised to her mouth. The composition is reminiscent of Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son”. Yet, where Goya depicts myth turned monstrous, Powell focuses on the domestic and interior. The horror is not a god destroying his child, but a woman alone with her own body. This is the most arresting single image in the room.

Elsewhere, bolder mixed-media pieces reveal an instinct for economical, expressive mark-making that extends into three dimensions. “My House”, built from layered, painted cardboard, echoes Powell’s curatorial interests beyond the studio. Earlier this year, she curated a group exhibition at Cardiff’s Canopi on the theme of home, inviting visitors to build shoebox dioramas of places where they felt a sense of belonging. That project feels like a companion piece, a natural precursor, to the domestic unease running through these paintings.

This show is unified by preoccupations with the body, isolation and disquiet, but there is also a distinct and delicious playfulness. Bright colours and cartoon faces speak to Welsh-learner Powell’s practice as a comic artist; her bilingual comic The Last Wizard of Cwmdafi was well received at the 2025 Shortbox Comics Fair. That title alone signposts her wider sensibility: myth, magic, and the uncanny run through her work across disciplines, from prose to sculpture. How these forces entangle themselves in ordinary, contemporary (and distinctly Gen Z) life is what holds this varied show together.

The real discovery of the exhibition, however, is a new selection of small oil pastel works sharing a vibrant fuchsia palette. Here, Powell seems most fully herself. Cats appear repeatedly (scratching an ear, asleep in a pub, or halfway out of a window) alongside a number of still life paintings and a tender portrait of a sleeping, unnamed man. These works are fuzzy and atmospheric. Their lightness does not undercut the show’s darker material so much as balance it, proving that Powell’s anguish and her sensitivity stem from the same place.

This is an eclectic and assured debut, showing, almost in real-time, a voice emerging, becoming louder and more refined. In isolation, the works are technically impressive and demonstrate an intimate relationship with colour and light. Together, they converse in satisfying, surprising ways. The show’s energy lives in the duality of the Generation Z experience: all its light, shade, and weirdness, with the strongest pieces pointing toward an artist who is most compelling when she leans into vulnerability. On this evidence, whatever Tess Powell does next is worth paying attention to.

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