The Gentle Painting Project: Pembrokeshire soil sample gathering

August 5, 20243 Mins Read

WE ARE delighted to invite you to participate in Rhiannon Rees’s Gentle Painting Project as part of SPAN Arts’ 2024 Love Stories to Nature program. For our latest commission for Love Stories to Nature, artist Rhiannon Rees is running a gentle painting project and for this we are collecting dry soil, rocks and pebbles from around Pembrokeshire.

Rhiannon Rees’s site-responsive practice merges her interest in sustainable painting practices with her Welsh heritage. Foraging for pigments and creating Welsh paints is key, it allows her to connect with her ancestorial land. Once, one side of her family mined the Welsh land, and the other farmed the land. Rhiannon spends time in locations across Wales collecting industrial waste and natural materials to form her gentle paints. Gentle Painting is Rhiannon uses gentle painting as a way of engaging with the land, and as a way to bring this connection into her studio.

The Gentle Painting Project invites Pembrokeshire communities to map the beautiful colours of their home county. We invite you all to send a small sample of earth, rock or clay from your garden to add to a pallet of sustainable paints which will be made and used in workshops to map out Pembrokeshire using its own colours.

Please send your dried earth samples in a sealed bag, within in a letter that can fit through a letterbox to: The Gentle Painting Project, SPAN Arts, Towns Moor, Moorfield Rd, Narberth. SA67 7AG by the 10th of August. In your letter detail your sample location so we can add it to the map. You can also drop off your sample at the SPAN building on Wednesdays between 10am and 5pm or bring your sample directly to a workshop.

Rhiannon will be holding two workshops in St Davids and Span Arts, where communities are invited to learn how to make gentle paints using the earths collected from their samples. The project will end with a tea and painting party where everyone will be able to use the gentle paints to share their own love stories to Pembrokeshire.