Fferm: Leading artists collaborate on joint exhibition

Stephen Price

Two of Wales’ leading artists have come together to form a special exhibition of new works which aim to document the beauty and abundance of life that can be supported by sustainable farming practices.

Focusing on one farm – Swmbarch Farm in Pembrokeshire – as their inspiration, painters Pete Monaghan and Maggie Brown bring together their moving social commentary in Fferm at The Gallery/Yr Oriel, Newport, Pembrokeshire from 29 May – 13 June 2026.

The farm is run by Gerwyn Williams, whose parents have farmed sustainably at Swmbarch Farm since 1959.

The works within the exhibition aim to highlight the importance of farming in harmony with nature, particularly with today’s increasing threats of industrial farming and climate catastrophe.

Pete Monaghan is a master of architectural art – with his evocative works featuring a wealth of farm buildings particularly from the Celtic fringes – often using found and discarded items within his intricately layered works.

As nature suffers with changing farming practices our built heritage is also disappearing at pace. Pete’s works for the exhibition focus on some of the buildings at Swmbarch Farm which evidence the repurposing of constructions in-line with farming methods.

Buildings that were once dwelling, cow byre and dairy have become storage, superfluous to modern farming methods, and his moving paintings document much of the overlooked beauty in the decay.

Conservation is central to Maggie Brown’s work. Her paintings provide a gritty portrayal of the natural world and speak with integrity and urgency to the viewer.

Scrubby moors and unkempt hedges are full of life. They are so disregarded, eroded subliminally and with
frightening consequences and she feels they deserve a second glance and preservation, within our modern farming practices.

Pete Monaghan

Explaining how the show came about, Monaghan shared: “We talk a lot about art and I sometimes teach at Maggie’s place in Pembrokeshire.

“We sketched around Gerwyn’s farm next door during a workshop and realised that, with its sustainable farming practice, the farm had the qualities that we both enjoyed i.e. conserving flora, fauna and old buildings.

“We have not yet seen the paintings side by side, only digitally, the first time that we will see them together will be in the gallery.”

Fferm is a documentation of sustainable farming practice – did you adapt your own style at all approaching this exhibition?

A self-imposed theme like this really helps challenge oneself. I can work within the given framework and find reasons to expand and hopefully enhance my practice. There are some works here made for fun or for exploration rather than having saleable qualities in mind.

Many of the buildings you document have survived generations, and are still in use to this day – sustainability in action you could say – do you feel we could learn more from looking back?

I’m attempting to document what we have as a current state, hope it’s not nostalgia. Quite a few building materials are making significant comebacks, lime especially but also clay and insulation materials like wool, so we are looking back and learning the value of historic materials, maybe we threw the baby out with the bathwater to some degree during the concrete boom of the sixties and seventies? Building layouts have necessarily changed with farming practices but many of the older vernacular buildings had been very well thought through, used, modified and amended over many generations, logically built into the landscape with materials that were to hand and so they still feel “of the landscape”. There is plenty to learn from our historic buildings.

What in particular led you to some of the buildings featured in this series?

I enjoyed the juxtaposition of old vernacular buildings against modern structures, this farm has plenty of . Typical of the region Ceredigion/Pembrokeshire is the dutch barn with slides attached.

Tua’r Gogledd stands out for its architectural elements which take more of the foreground than perhaps many of your other works, how did you decide to work this way?

I’ve had this idea for some years; to include architectural plans in my paintings or to use them as starting points. I enjoy annotation in paintings, notations of building details or other seemingly banal comments, even of the weather at the time.

Another surprise for me was the monochrome print, which also feels exciting among the other works of yours – have you dabbled with this style much before?

I’ve been trying some intaglio printing and in this show will be a series of four small prints for the first time. My studio is alongside Aberystwyth Printmakers so I have all the equipment at hand. It’s good to use some of the facilities and challenge myself with new techniques. The marks that can be made with printmaking are so different to painting, it’s fascinating!

Maggie Brown

Despite wildlife featuring in this exhibition, Maggie considers herself more of landscape painter, finding that her connection with nature is vital.

Outdoors, she writes, paint and draw in sketchbooks, using all senses to imprint into memory the feeling of a unique wild place, the seasons, weather and earthiness.

Her acrylic paintings often incorporate sand and glue, wood shavings and collage to create texture and in turn, looseness to express the light and elements of our countryside – a Trojan horse with which she aims to perhaps even help in its conservation.

Explaining her relationship with the farm and how it’s inspired this series of paintings, she told Nation Cymru: “I came to Letterston with my husband and child, no income, and a view to create art retreat of sorts, hence ‘ Indigo Brown’ Residential Painting Holidays’ .

It’s always been important to me to take the clients out everyday to sketch parts of Pembrokeshire so I’ve come to know every landscape, hedgerow and coast through artist’s eyes).

Where able, we’ve always helped farmer Gerwyn to herd his cattle across the road, and had buildings either side of the road to store his cows and calves.

Swmbarch Farm is farmed, solely by Gerwyn, and in semi traditional ways, when calved, the calves stay with mothers on pasture most of their lives until they’re moved on as store or for beef.

Hedgerows are ‘cared for with nature in mind and he has planted trees and redeveloped hedges for biodiversity. With the way that industrial farming has taken over this area, in the last 15 or so years I have seen a demise of nature populations and pollution on a grand scale.

I’ve since made a concerted effort to use my art as a tool, a protest even, because, after suffering from what I can only describe as, progressive ‘eco grief’ for years, it became a positive way for me to deal with it and try to make people aware of our loss of habitat and wildlife.

Conservation and nature has always played a big part in my life and combining paintings of birds, the landscape, the cattle, even the portrait of Gerwyn, hopefully tells a visual story to others – and how important ‘inspiration’ is in all of our lives.

What made you choose the specific subject matters – flora, fauna as opposed to Pete’s focus on buildings?

Love of it all and it’s always my inspiration!

Buildings have always been the inspiration for Pete, and after he ran a course here, using Gerwyn’s barns as material, the idea grew that Fferm could happen.

One painting is called ‘Light and Life, Hawthorn, as found in Gerwyn’s hedgerow (My inspiration)’ which was a follow on from a 2 month exhibition at Oriel y Parc, St Davids 2024 called ‘Hawthorn’….I love trees…

I found 9 hawthorn trees in Pembrokeshire and studied them over a couple of years, in all weathers, (see instagram ‘mbrmaggie’ and ‘mbrmaggienature’) with conservation in mind and how important nature is, and for the biodiversity of species.

The focus on the birds, in this show Fferm, are supposedly, ‘common’ of garden and field. I found a wonderful Thrushes Anvil, (3 in fact, have pic if interested) which showed me there was a large population of these rare birds in Gerwyn’s field, also shows a large population of snails, that are its food source too and a healthy bio diversity.

The eight birds painted, are on the RSPB growing ‘Red List ,Birds of Conservation Concern’…which show a demise of certain species that have experienced severe 50% or more declines in UK breeding or non breeding populations over the last 25 years, which is appalling!

That is just the bird list, but flowers, butterflies, mammals, amphibians and moths etc are struggling in the same way.

Can you tell us more about the wildlife on the farm?

Gerwyn and I do talk over the gate about nature we’ve spotted!

Hedgehog trails, Swallows nesting in his barn ( same old depletion in numbers over the years, as was the demise of 7 nesting pairs of swifts on my house, over 25 left in 2017, since then they have all disappeared).

On a positive note,  a couple of ‘Priority Species’ have been catalogued here, for example Marsh Fritillary Butterfly which has prompted me to try to organise a conservation group to create a corridor for wildlife, of local farmers and home/garden owners to try to make small changes that make a big difference to nature.

Poetry features on the flyer – and Wales is particularly known for its nature poetry – how have these inspired your work?

I love R S Thomas, Jackie Morris, Mary Oliver and more, and I love quotes that have profound meaning about the fact we are integral to nature.

My newest favourite is from David Attenborough: ‘ If we damage the Natural World we damage ourselves’

I asked local poet Mike Sharpe, (in his 90’s and coffee morning once a week, he lives 3 fields away!) and Bethan Walton to supply poetry about the Hawthorn Tree in the last exhibition.

Nature is their inspiration, it doesn’t matter the materials we use to express things, as long as it speaks -whether words, or paint.

“I feel we greatly underestimate the importance of ‘inspiration’, and the wellbeing that creativity and nature gives us.”

Fferm takes place at The Gallery/Yr Oriel, Newport, Pembrokeshire from 29 May – 13 June 2026.