Rebuild the Poets: G39 stage exhibition of groundbreaking overlooked and forgotten works

Stephen Price

Cardiff artist-run gallery g39 is set to stage a groundbreaking new exhibition which revisits the works of some of the most exciting artists working in Wales today – re-focusing eyes on works that may have been previously overlooked alongside notorious works performed many decades ago.

Rebuild the Poets will represent works from Sam Aldridge, Adéọlá Dewis, Sean Edwards, Heledd C Evans, Athena Jones, Tamara Krikorian, Jon Pountney + J. Brookes, Jeffrey Steele + Katrina Blannin, Wendy Short in an exhibition and programme of activities, re-performances, re-introductions and replicas of artists work spanning several generations.

The show gets its title from a placard that appeared on fencing after a local pub, The Poets Corner, that stood near Shelley Walk and Shakespeare Street, was demolished in 2016 to make way for redevelopment.

Over the last decade g39 has been testing assumptions of how they as a collective view development and success. Rebuild the Poets reflects their idea that progress is not a straight line between the past and now, but more of a scribble, unpredictable and connecting at multiple points.

A consumer ideal that fetishises newness over content often means that things that should be noticed slip by. Without nostalgia, the gallery hopes to bring some of these works to light – to slow down production and revisit important artists at significant moments in their practice.

Rebuild the poets

The artists later discovered that Rebuild the Poets was a placard by poet and activist J. Brookes – remade and replaced every time contractors removed it in a small act of defiance.

A photograph by artist Jon Pountney of the sign in-situ forms an integral part of the set – the plot of land, like much of City Road, is currently being redeveloped.

Highlighting disappearing landmarks and memories of growing up in Cardiff, Athena Jones’ painting City Road at Night is of a building earmarked for demolition.

Renovated multiple times the distinctive domed façade has been a bowling alley, a bar, a bingo hall – but originally in 1912 it opened as the Gaiety Electric Theatre with its own custom-built pipe-organ accompanying silent films.

In Spring 2023 composer and artist Heledd C Evans was part of a project with Ty Cerdd and Theatr SOAR in Merthyr Tydfil, creating new work for the theatre’s restored mechanical organ.

As part of the exhibition, a recording of the composition played by Huw Morgan will fill the gallery once an hour.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, a number of other important works have been brought back to the public. Sean Edwards’ sculpture Photocopied Staedtler Noris HB Pencil was made when he graduated in Cardiff in 2003 – an elaborate process of sanding and photocopying an exact facsimile of a pencil replaces the depleted original.

Adéọlá Dewis recovers the fragments of her first performance and exhibition in Wales, Out of the Frame at g39 in 2005. And they have also been able to re-screen Patsy, by Wendy Short, a film about time, mortality and generational change that was made for g39’s Jerwood UNITe programme in 2021 but was all but eclipsed by lockdown restrictions.

Moments of change

The exhibition will also re-show Tamara Krikorian, known across Wales as director of Cywaith Cymru, whose library partly formed the basis of the one at g39.

In Rebuild the Poets, g39 will showcase some of her pioneering moving image works of the late 1970s, designed to interrupt the flow of TV broadcasting.

The exhibition also includes an original silkscreen-printed billboard, DOMENICO by Jeffrey Steele, last seen pasted up on sites across Wales in 1967 commissioned by the Welsh Arts Council under the leadership of Peter Jones.

Jones authored a series of such projects, mixing high and low culture to reflect Wales’ own democratic traditions, as distinct from the then restrictive outlook of the Arts Council of Great Britain.

g39 has been able to present this with the help of Steele’s collaborator and friend Katrina Blannin who is showing a series of prints, DOMENICA, that respond to the original.

At the centre of this exhibition is some of Sam Aldridge’s archive, including his project Modernist Movement (pictured above).

In the exhibition is a replica of his scaled-replica of Barbara Hepworth’s 1968 sculpture Three Obliques (Walk In), which is permanently sited outside Cardiff University.

In 2012 in partnership with EMP projects as part of Cardiff Contemporary he moved his lightweight version across the city, making and un-making the structure at different sites, including g39.

Sam was a remarkable artist who the studio worked with over several years with a lively and constantly evolving sense of play. They are pleased to represent this work alongside maquettes and plans and drawings, as well as his work with the BRG collective presented together for the first time.

Rebuild the Poets is not the complete list of things that we feel should be noticed, but it shows a particular selection of work from the last few decades brought together at g39.

There are moments of significance, and moments of change and it is noticing these that can help us understand the roles we all play in the story

REBUILD the POETS launches on Friday 3 October 2025 at g39, Oxford St, Cardiff CF24 3DT at 18.00-21.00, and runs until 13 December 2025