Current Exhibitions

Gallery – Josef Herman: Artistiaid Ffoadur Cymru Refugee Artists

Sep 28 – Nov 12 2023, Open daily 10-5pm

A unique exhibition comprising works by Josef Herman, Maurice Sochachewsky, Martin Bloch, Fred Uhlman, Bettina Adler, Heinz Koppel and Harry Weinberger, which has been brought together for the first time thanks to generous loans from Ben Uri Gallery, Brecon Y Gaer Museum, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Big Pit National Coal Museum, Martin Bloch Trust, Trinity Hall Cambridge, as well as from private collections.

In the Sculpture Gallery, there will be a parallel exhibition of works made by those currently seeking sanctuary in Wales, who have the passion and courage to create. This exhibition has been specially co-produced with our refugee communities to promote their creativity and to celebrate Welsh stories of hospitality, humanity and hope.

Printmaker in Focus Gallery - Aine Venables

July 22 - Nov 2023, Open daily 10-5pm

Aine has worked as a creative practitioner in arts education for over 30 years, teaching visual communication in further and higher education. In more recent years she has developed her own illustration practice and has explored different narratives through mixed media and print.

After joining Hay Festival as a freelance designer, she has gone on to become Learning and Engagement Manager with the festival. She facilitates relevant and engaging creative experiences for young people during the festival and throughout the year while developing her own creative practice inspired by themes of identity, location and belonging.

Café Gallery - Golden Valley Faces

Until end of September 2023, Open daily 10-5pm

Richard Jenkins was born in 1890 on a farm ten miles from Hay: and he became a brilliant pioneering photographer. He longed to escape the drudgery of farming – to go away and study. Instead he had to console himself by learning to wield a cumbersome camera, taking and developing spontaneous and moving portraits of his friends and neighbours going about their everyday lives. He had a gift for capturing his subjects’ personalities, paying tribute to their fortitude and skills.

Miraculously, nearly a thousand of his glass-plate images survived decades of neglect; and since the publication of Golden Valley Faces in 2020, his work has begun to be recognised as a remarkable record of life in rural Herefordshire at the start of the twentieth century.

Hay Castle Shop

Open daily 10-5pm

Visit our lovely Castle Gift Shop, next to the café on the ground floor for a variety of unusual gifts, cards, castle merchandise, books, prints and applied arts from UK makers. Perfect for birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas or just treat yourself to something beautiful! We are open every day between 10am and 5pm.

Past Exhibitions

First Floor Photography - Jasper Fforde

August 2023

Using the corridor as a new exhibition space we are pleased to be showing some trichrome photography by the author, Jasper Fforde. These innovative images emulate the very earliest colour photographic techniques to create a colour image from three black and white negatives. All of the images were taken as black and white images and use filters to create a full colour photograph.

Gallery - Architecture & Poetry

May 26 - 3 Sep 2023, Curated by Fabio Barry

Architecture and poetry are two seemingly disparate artforms which are put together for the first time in this exhibition by presenting three overlapping themes: poems inscribed on buildings; buildings inspired by poems; and concrete poetry - poems which visually represent their subject.

The exhibition begins on the Castle exterior with a newly commissioned light poem from poet-sculptor Robert Montgomery and culminates in Pelé Cox’s verse inscription for Eric Parry’s Building 7 at Chelsea Barracks as well as the words of bilingual poet Gwyneth Lewis for the Wales Millennium Centre at Cardiff. Alongside this, the exhibition details three architectural designs by Níall McLaughlin which were inspired by poems, including the International Rugby Experience at Limerick which has its origins in the poem Beowulf. These architectural exhibits are complemented by a collection of concrete poetry from the 1960s to the present including The Mouse’s Tale by Lewis Carrol

Fittingly for a town that straddles the borderlands, the exhibition combines the contributions of architects, poets, artists, and designers from Wales, England, Ireland and Scotland. This exhibition was curated by Fabio Barry.

Printmaker in Focus Gallery - Clyro School

June 29 - July 2023

For their 'Evolve and Experience' topic, the pupils focused on the question 'What is in the world around us? They looked at human and physical geographical features in our locality, in Wales and in the wider world. They studied the work of the Welsh artist, Rhiannon Roberts, who includes many human and natural features in her work. They then created pieces of artwork in her style and included the human and physical features that they had learnt about.

Class 2's artwork focused on features of space, locality and place in Wales. Class 3 focused on a wider view of the world with their artwork being of special and lesser known places across the world.

Printmaker in Focus Gallery - Mali Morris

May - June 26 2023

Mali Morris’s explorations into colour and space in painting have made her one of the leading abstract artists working in Britain today. Fascinated by how relationships of colour can structure luminosity, she has continued, since the 1970s, to experiment with the language of painting, arriving at imagery that is both radiant and direct. Mali has also occasionally collaborated with Master Printers, predominantly with Kip Gresham in Cambridge, and is constantly intrigued by the multiple parallels and differences between painting and printmaking.

Mali Morris was born in Caernarfon and during her childhood lived in various locations around North Wales before settling in London in the 1970s. She was elected to the Royal Academy in 2010 and has exhibited extensively in the UK and abroad; a solo show in New York took place in October 2022, and a review of her paintings from the past 25 years opens at Ikon, Birmingham in September 2023.

Gallery - Life in Colour

Feb 23 - May 14 2023

This exhibition celebrates the life and work of Hay-on-Wye and Clyro’s late Artist in Residence, Eugene Fisk. A former monk inspired by the Fauvists of the 20th century, Fisk’s mastery of colour and the drawn line represent a life devoted to art and the unravelling of the boundaries between the material and spiritual worlds.

Told in collaboration with the Kilvert Gallery, formerly of Clyro’s Ashbrook House and the home of Eugene Fisk and Lizzie Organ, Life in Colour spans 30 years of vibrant portraiture and landscape painting to revisit an alternative way of seeing people and past histories. As the desire to reconnect with nature deepens, along with the need to mindfully reconcile our place within it, perhaps it is time to look again at Eugene’s inner way of outward seeing.

The Kilvert Gallery was created by Lizzie Organ and Eugene Fisk, and as a shrine to design and curation, it represented contemporary artists including Roger Cecil, William Mills, Maryclare Foa, Clive Hicks-Jenkins, Charles Shearer, and Rachel Windham. For more information click HERE.

Sculpture Gallery - Ceramics in Colour

March 31 - May 14 2023

Continuing our Castle in Colour theme we have invited 6 contemporary UK makers to exhibit. From the sweeping brush strokes of the landscape ceramics of Dennis Farrell to the precise and beautifully visual coloured slip work from Sophie MacCarthy, all the work celebrates colour with each potter using their own unique making style to create work to enhance any space.

The hand-painted and engaging pots of Ingrid Saag take you on a ceramic journey with inspiration from poetry and nature using bold brush strokes on the abstract work and delicate patterns on others. They complement the gorgeously restrained work from Clare Conrad who explores colour and texture inspired by the effect of light and ageing on architecture, artefacts and the landscape, each piece contrasting the delicate smooth matt interior with the textured and layered colours of the exterior.

Texture features strongly in the contemplative work of Peter Beard. Strong, simple shapes are made using a wax resist technique involving a combination of shiny, matt and semi-matt glazes building up layers to create complex textured surfaces with the wax being used to isolate areas during the glaze application. Philip Evans' strking, hand built vessels show his particular interest in textures and worn surfaces. Drawing influences from Pompeii, Herculaneum and Orvieto in Italy his work uses coloured clays to produce multi-fired pots embellished with gold leaf and bold colour.

Printmaker in Focus Gallery

Next to our 1853 printing press on the first floor we have our new Printmaker in Focus mini-gallery. This space is dedicated to exhibiting the work of local upcoming printmakers whose work is for sale both framed and unframed.

Our current exhibition is by Graeme Hobbs, producer of cards, prints, chapbooks and sundry curiosities. All of the works are made using vintage image blocks and hand-set metal type. See more at fallowpages.art