Exhibition by Peter Finnemore in which he uses wallpaper, paint and decorating supplies from his family home to blur craft and fine art, photographed in the rooms they came from.
Peter Finnemore's Silvers of Space is running at Glynn Vivian Art Gallery from 16 October 2026 to 3 January 2027. It's a Welsh artist's show that's spent four decades orbiting his family home, Gwendraeth House, in the Gwendraeth Valley, West Wales. Finnemore was born in Carmarthenshire in 1963, and that house is the whole starting point here.
He works with trade materials collected from the place — layers of wallpaper, paint and decorating supplies — and uses them to blur the line between craft and fine art. Once the pieces are finished, he photographs them inside the very rooms they came from. The project sets up a conversation across generations, particularly with his great-uncle Sidney Finnemore, who was a painter-decorator and an amateur artist. It also expands Finnemore's long photo-art practice into painting, collage and video, so there's a fair bit more to see than just photographs.
Finnemore studied at the Glasgow School of Art and the University of Michigan, represented Wales at the Venice Biennale in 1997, and his work is held in public collections including the Arts Council Collection. Silvers of Space hangs alongside Neighbours: Borders, Bodies and belonging, a companion exhibition he curated from the collections of Amgueddfa Cymru, the National Library of Wales and the Glynn Vivian itself. You can see both in one go.
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The gallery is on Alexandra Road in Swansea, SA1 5DZ. It's open 10:00 am to 4:30 pm, closed Mondays except Bank Holidays, and it's free to all.
