Jenő Davies and Iolo Walker: Meadowsweet Palisade

Meadowsweet Palisade is the first exhibition in a public gallery by Wales-based artists Jenő Davies and Iolo Walker and marks the return of the artists to Wales. Presenting a bricolage of sculpture, sound and film, it reflects the power of rural peripheries to create spaces of renewal and transformation.

Central to the exhibition and conceived jointly by Davies and Walker, the film Pinwydd is set in Machynlleth, home to a low-flying military aircraft training route, known as the Mach Loop. The story follows Blod, a fighter jet, voiced by Welsh actor Sue Jones Davies, who is stuck in an infinite loop of destruction. Blod is shot down by Oen, an anthropomorphic anarchist lamb, in retaliation for the felling of her friend Pin, a carbon capture forest spirit. Oen then becomes the prisoner of Mr. Candy, who is the owner of Blod and the architect of planetary destruction.   

Rooted in the real world of landlordism, climate collapse, and extractivism, Pinwydd draws on fantasy and sci-fi tropes alongside the Welsh Mabinogion myth of Blodeuwedd, to rupture the seeming inescapability of capitalism. Centring friendship, multi-species entanglements and the commons it brings not-quite yet worlds within reach. Made with family, friends, and neighbours, Pinwydd is a DIY blockbuster that speaks to the power of resistance and community.

The artists’ worldbuilding continues through sculpture, sound and embroideries. In Davies’ West Wales Reclamation and Salvage, an assemblage of miniature dioramas and found materials are amassed on a makeshift cart. Made of bicycle wheels and whittled handles, part-fantasy and part-utilitarian; it forms a travelling archive of realms to be rehearsed. Their monumental tree, Watchtower, references the camouflage trees of the First World War. Drawing on the language of theatrical scenery and artifice, this sculpture offers a place to hide as you’re invited to enter the tree and observe the surroundings via a periscope. 

Hollows are also inhabited by Walker, in Katniss bedroom gaming speakers sit in shells on the gallery floor and become mouthpieces for metabolising grief, sharing field recordings, playlists and sounds in memoriam to a friend who has passed. Slippages between worlds and bodies reverberate across Walker’s works, a luminous embroidery depicts details of a Roman statuette of Hermaphroditus, described in mythology as being neither yet both sexes.

The exhibition traverses introspection, loss and in-between states, mythologising the rural landscape of Mid-Wales and contemporary culture to reflect on the past and what’s yet to come.

The exhibition was commissioned and produced by Chapter.