Help bring prize-winning artist to Swansea

YOUR help is needed to bring a major prize-winning artist to Swansea.

Gillian Wearing, a conceptual artist who won the Turner Prize in 1997, has picked the Dylan Thomas Centre, along with four other premier arts venues across the UK, to go forward to a public vote to determine which venue she’ll work with during October’s Museums at Night event.

Wearing’s art is known for exploring themes of identity, investigating tensions between our public and private personas, and between fiction and reality. These are concepts she’d like to explore with participants at the winning venue.

In an open statement to bidding venues, Gillian said: “My idea is to do a personal karaoke, to ask members of the public to write about themselves based upon a topic of my or the museum’s choosing, set these lyrics to music and then have a karaoke machine they can sing off with their written lines.”

Swansea Council, which is behind the ‘Love the Words’ exhibition at the Dylan Thomas Centre, is encouraging people to vote and win the artist for the city.

Cllr Robert Francis-Davies, Cabinet Member for Enterprise, Development and Regeneration, said: “I was really pleased to learn that the Dylan Thomas Centre was one of the five venues selected by Gillian Wearing to go through to the public vote.

“I believe it’s telling of Swansea’s rich and diverse culture that such a leading contemporary artist wants to visit the city to delve into themes of identity and persona.

“Dylan Thomas was known to play with different identities, even performing them in his famous play for voices, ‘Under Milk Wood’, and we’re excited about a project that explores ideas of perception in a fun manner like that of a personal karaoke.

“But we now need local people to play their part and help us win the artist for Swansea.”

The poll, now open, is available online at www.museumsatnight.org.uk/gillian-wearing until Saturday May 16.