With its closing date approaching, The Art of the Book is the final chance to experience the imaginative world of Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins at Hay Castle.

Hicks-Jenkins takes heroes like Beowulf, Gawain, Achilles and Odysseus and makes them march off the page and into your head. Drawing, sketching and building his way into a story, he brings ancient myths and classic tales to life with energy, emotion and a touch of strangeness.

From Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf and Simon Armitage’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to The Iliad, The Odyssey and Beauty and the Beast, these familiar stories are retold in bold, dramatic images packed with movement and feeling.

He said: “I spend a long time living with a story, trying to understand how it moves and breathes. Seeing these characters in Hay Castle feels right. It’s already a place full of stories, and I can’t help wondering what Beowulf, Gawain, Achilles and the rest get up to once the gates are locked and the lights go out.”

Walking through the exhibition is like stepping into a story. Figures appear out of the shadows, scenes glow with colour, and the castle itself becomes part of the drama. It’s a place of darkness and light, quiet moments and dramatic encounters, where drawings and stories take on a life of their own.

Tom True, Director of Hay Castle, said: “Clive’s work is proof of magic. He steps inside the stories that he illustrates, painstakingly creating new worlds full of enchanting characters and atmospheres. The exhibition invites visitors to inhabit the halls of Camelot and the battlefields of Troy, or to freeze before the gruesome monsters facing Beowulf. We love Clive’s visions for their theatre, poetry, darkness and love.”

The Art of the Book runs at Hay Castle until March 8.