UWIC Gallery

Shoving art into high street shopping spaces is no new thing. Sometimes it is done badly (The awful Blue Dot ‘Gallery’ upstairs in the Capitol Centre), and sometimes it is done well — think the TactileBosch invasion of performance art into disused shop fronts and commercial units a couple of years back. UWIC ‘s new gallery outlet in the Capitol centre lands somewhere in the middle of the spectrum what with being a showcase for Freshers and second year undergraduate art and design students from UWIC. Still any way you look at it, it serves a useful learning experience for both artist and Joe Public on showing and experiencing art in the public eye away from your usual white spaces. An interesting experiment.

I think this is a truly amazing idea; a relatively safe space in a bustling city centre used to display artwork of all kinds made by the art department of one of the local universities. A place where artists can be exposed to the often cruel gaze of the public to get their first taste of subjective appraisal outside of the relative safety of the university walls. And what’s more, it’s free for the public to enter and look about.
This is a hugely beneficial experience for the artists in question; not only do they get their work displayed as professional artists, potentially for the first time, they also receive criticism and plaudits from the appreciating public. They get to gauge what pieces of their art touches an audience in a way they have never been able to before this, and it is placed there without the pressure of sales, or of professional criticism; it is a purely artistic endeavour.
And apart from the artists, this is a tremendous benefit for the city. To have a small, secluded space to view the work of potential artists is one of those incredible little points of interest that keeps the city unique and prevents Cardiff from drifting into the same high street experience as everywhere else.