Anne Price-Owen

This handsome, full colour book celebrates forty years of the work of Ken Elias, from student op art/collage to current work made in response to poetry. As an artist Elias is something of a conundrum. Born and once again based in Glynneath, he draws extensively on his locale and on his childhood in the Fifties, in particular his extended family and his frequent cinema going. Yet he is almost unique in Wales in his continuing adherence to Pop Art and collage. Taught by John Selway, Terry Setch and Ernest Zobole at Newport Art College in the 1960s collage and photomontage remain at the centre of his work, including his paintings: flattening perspectives, unexpectedly contrasting images, producing social and political commentary, assimilating a modernist urban artform into a Valleys context. Elias' is an art which blurs the edges of reality in a similar fashion to cinema. It asks the viewer to look afresh at the familiar and the domestic, and to question their own reality. The book, which accompanies a touring exhibition, includes five essays by leading commentators in the field: Hugh Adams - 'Who are you to decide what reality is?' Anne Price-Owen - 'Ken Elias and the Hidden Persuaders' David Briers - 'Ken Elias and the Art of Photomontage' Jon Gower - 'Going to the Pictures' Ceri Thomas - 'Ken Elias: An Overview'

Tim Davies is one of the most exciting artists working in Britain today. Internationally exhibited and acclaimed he specialises in art which explores identity through artefacts - he has approached Wales through wool, fire, oil-drenched seabird feathers, lead from the roof of a disused chapel. More exotically he has returned a tropical hardwood parquet floor to the Belizean jungle from whence it came, laying the blocks among the trees where new plants now grow through them and termites erode them. Change, organic and by intervention, and method are at the centre of Davies' art; process is its determining feature. In a retrospective approach three leading critics provide an illuminating and informative commentary to his work. David Alston is the Keeper of Art at the Lowry Centre; Iwan Bala is one of Wales' leading artists and critics; Anne Price-Owen is Senior Lecturer in Art at the Swansea Institute. Together they explore the practise, the international context, the Welsh context and the recurring motifs of Tim Davies' work. Davies himself also provides a commentary on five of his significant pieces, and the Foreword is provided by Susan Daniel-McElroy, Director of Tate St Ives. Tim Davies was born in Haverforwest in 1960, and has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, including shows in Australia, Mexico, Hong Kong, Belize, Ireland, Estonia, Poland and Croatia.