New exhibition showcases 20 years of work by Welsh artist

A month after his debut novel was published, artist Anthony Shapland opens a solo exhibition Liar Liar at Aberystwyth Arts Centre.

The presentation brings together works in text, sculpture, books, print, audio and film, with the earliest being twenty years old and the most recent created in the last month.

Liar Liar is in many parts, blurring the distinctions between writing and art. The show takes its name from a chapter in Shapland’s book, A Room Above a Shop, and there is a sense of play between those worlds – even if it is bittersweet.

On one level the exhibition is about illusions and tricks. It borrows hidden techniques from filmmaking including props, filters, light and sound. On another level, it draws on Shapland’s life experience of rural queerness and growing up performing straight. It builds on the sense that if he was passing and blending-in then the landscape around him was just as malleable and fluid, constantly evolving, always temporary – a story.

 It’s this landscape that links the particular works selected for Liar Liar, many of them made in and around the same places that the book is set, the artist’s hometown of Bargoed in South Wales. 

Film

A Setting is the first film in the gallery. An early piece, from 2007, the title works on two levels, both as a constructed location for a scene, as well as the marker of the day’s end. Very little arrives or leaves but what changes is the light. A solitary figure sits waiting. There is added pathos in knowing that this is the artist’s father.

Filmed on the same hill two years earlier, A Sign. In this quiet place, a remarkable thing happens. A fly-tipped Christmas tree bursts into flames before the scene returns to normal and the birds sing as though nothing changed. 

Pink paper often appears in Shapland’s work, an everyday photocopy stock. Frequently used in early gay zines or fliers, it was the signal of a source of news, of connection. FiftytwoSundays, 2018, is a scrapbook of fibs, half-truths and stories. Some fictional, some true they are pre-echoes of the novel.

Similarly Between the Dog and the Wolf, 2019, is a moving image collection of observations, influences and ideas without a beginning or an end. To shoot day for night, a blue filter is put over underexposed footage to make twilight, when you could mistake an obedient dog for a chaotic wolf.

Centre

A Sound not Meant to be Heard is at the centre of the exhibition. A multi-screen film, it features a projection, a four-screen soundtrack and an on-screen autocue script.

In the projection, on a screen painted that pink, a character wanders through the same landscape we have seen previously. Passing time, idling, he walks up and out of a town, beyond the tree line and climbs up to the sheep-grazed highest point. 

This film has no recorded sound of its own, but opposite, on a wooden scaffold, a Foley artist syncs himself to this character using props and a mixing desk. Foley refers to the creation of sound effects, named after sound pioneer Jack Foley. 

There is joy in seeing a trick revealed, witnessing one thing standing in for another, it is comical. At times it’s hard to understand which sound is true, but on top of the hill, the player pauses and the mood shifts. Agitated he takes a deep breath.

And he shouts –

– the Foley artist stops; the monologue of the script waits. Without the fictional Foley noise, it is unnaturally quiet, uncomfortable. Something is being said that is not revealed, that can’t be mimicked; un-voiced it is not heard by us and in the sudden silence, the illusion collapses. 

Montage

Tucked away a new film Seven Starling, 2025 is a montage of starlings imitating man-made sounds. Like Foley it stands-in, mimics borrowed noise – a phone, R2D2, a car alarm. In the second part of this work, nests filled with starling eggs and props – man-made replica’s. These natural mimics follow the seven birds closest to them in a murmur, reacting to signals and signs. 

Above us in the centre of the gallery a large wooden structure reveals itself. A billboard, full size – Bargoed, in stereo taken in 1987. Reinvented from a found photo the artist invites you to cross your eyes to try and see the landscape in 3D – to be there, at that time of huge change. De-industrialised, the remains of Europe’s largest coal-tip mark a landscape in flux. 

In the sky above floats the legend SMALLTOWN MAN, referencing the groundbreaking single, Smalltown Boy, released in 1984 by Bronski Beat. Back then the video and lyrics show a young man having to leave home, to escape. 

Shapland asks himself ‘What happens when you stay?’ When you become a man in the place where you were a boy? Growing up in a world that was only just starting to shift its social, legal and moral attitudes meant that life was lived in two parts, performed. It was never what it seemed, nothing could be trusted for what it appeared to be, and the desire to not stand-out, even after coming-out, has had a lasting impact on his work, filled with references to stage and backstage, to a performance of life. 

Liar Liar, with all of its references to place and pretence and formative experiences looks at exactly that.

Liar Liar runs from the 24 April until 15 June 2025 at Aberystwyth Arts Centre.

As part of the exhibition a new Welsh adaptation of the novel, Lan Stâr, written in dialogue with poet and artist Esyllt Angharad Lewis will be launched in June. Liar Liar was supported by an Arts Council of Wales Create grant. Anthony Shapland is a Welsh artist and writer. He is the founder of g39, Cardiff, where he currently works.