Artist and photographer Jon Pountney takes us into the National Library of Wales – its galleries and its secret caves – as we follow a group of young people visiting with Gisda, a charity providing support and opportunities for young people in north Wales.
A visit to recent exhibition Idyll and Industry – a collaboration with the National Gallery in London that featured almost 90 Welsh landscapes - gives the group plenty to think about on the theme of Cynefin or sense of place.
Putting on their helmets and going underground, visitors find out about the Library’s history of hiding masterpieces for the National Gallery during the Second World War.
Paintings were hidden in the same way in the Manod slate mine in north Wales, near to where many of them grew up.
See how the group uses slate, a dominant feature of this landscape, to record their reflections about what sense of place means to them.
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Jon Pountney is a photographer and artist living in south Wales. His photograph Capel Rhiw, Blaenau Ffestiniog (2023) featured in the Idyll and Industry exhibition at the National Library of Wales (May – September 2024), which took place as part of the National Gallery’s 200th anniversary National Treasures project. The exhibition featured Canaletto’s The Stonemason’s Yard on loan from the National Gallery, as well as almost 90 depictions of the Welsh landscape, of which almost 50 were contemporary works.
