Hay Castle is set to welcome a groundbreaking new exhibition to coincide with this year's Hay Festival.
Architecture & Poetry begins at Hay Castle this Friday, May 26 and will run until September 3.
This week, Hay Castle is celebrating the one-year anniversary since the completion of their extensive renovation and regeneration project, as designed and managed by MICA architects.
The latest exhibition is seen as an opportunity to show how far they have come, and to showcase the quality of their visual arts programming.
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Architecture & Poetry is curated by the art historian, Fabio Barry (Associate Fellow, Warburg Institute, University of London), and features award-winning national and international architects, designers, artists and writers including Robert Montgomery, MICA, Eric Parry, Pelé Cox, and Niall McLaughlin. The exhibition will be the very first UK show to explore the relationship between architecture and poetry.
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 is made possible through the support of Robert Lance Hughes, Francine Stock and MICA Architects.
MICA have curated an exhibition, and will be hosting a talk, showcasing the redevelopment of Hay Castle, together with the design of a ‘palisade’ installation in the grounds referencing the historic Castle enclosure.