Connah’s Quay: University of Chester billboard artwork about Wales’s highest mountain goes on display

A new artwork has been installed in a Deeside town as part of a University of Chester research project about Wales’s highest mountain.

The 48-sheet billboard artwork, measuring 18 square metres, can be seen on the gable end of a property at 65 High Street, Connah’s Quay, (B5129) from October 25 to November 22.

It follows two recent exhibitions curated by Dr Cian Quayle, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Chester, who have been working on an interdisciplinary research project titled Retracing Footsteps – The Changing Landscape of Yr Wyddfa / Snowdon.

The project is co-led by artist Cian and cultural geographer Dr Daniel Bos, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography. Daniel and the team have been researching 19th century visitor books which were held in summit hotel (huts).

The visitor books include commentaries, drawings and poems, and in their experiential, anecdotal and sometimes humorous account of the heyday of tourism, provide a contrast to the way in which we record our experience of travel and place today.

Recent graduates as well as current students are working in a partnership and participatory capacity alongside the research team.

Cian said: “This artwork integrates image and text as in its cinematographic’ presentation and proposal Walking, Seeing and Reading the Landscape in which a lyrical inventory of isolated words and phrases evokes the liminal boundaries of time, space and lived-experience”.

All landscapes are shaped by their human imprint and the 1,085-metre Yr Wyddfa is host to over 600,000 visitors a year.

The project considers the environmental impact upon the mountain, and concern for unsustainable tourism, levels of plastic pollution and waste, and climate change.

Cian’s personal project also retraces the footsteps of artist JMW Turner, whose work in North Wales was said to be his first experience in his pursuit of the sublime.

Cian added: “The sublime is historically defined by apprehension and fear, which gives way to awe and wonderment. Today this conception of the sublime and the nature seeing and spectatorship, has been supplanted by one which is mediated through images which are ‘captured’ rather than ‘made’. The proliferation of mobile phone images is equally unsustainable in its unseen carbon footprint, where an unbounded volume of images are modulated, transmitted and mediated by an algorithm-defined reception rather than contemplation and reflection.”

“This artwork is located in Connah’s Quay which – alongside Buckley, Shotton, and Flint – are towns on the Flintshire and North Wales border with England.”

“Over time, these towns have developed as diverse communities, set against a maritime and post-industrial legacy, and an altogether different set of factors which impact upon this part of Wales, and the social and economic challenges which the area faces today.”

The next phase of this project sees the development of a collaboration with Eryri Snowdonia National Park Authority and the presentation of photography, artworks and a contemporary visitor book experience at Betws-y-Coed and Hafod Eryri Visitor Centres in December 2024 and May 2025 respectively. A second billboard artwork by Cian will also be exhibited in Chester in April 2025.