Carreg Ateb: Vision or Dream? brings together newly commissioned works by Welsh artists alongside works by Jeremy Deller and significant collection objects from the National Museum of Wales, Storiel, and Llandudno Museum. 

“Carreg Ateb” is the name of a rock believed to cause an echo, an answering stone. In this context the exhibition invites reflections on how we listen to the past and how we imagine the future. Moving between memory and material, identity and transformation, dream and vision, the artists engage with the land, languages, and layered histories that shape contemporary Wales. 

Lewis Prosser’s ceremonial wicker sculptures, inspired by civic regalia, embody human-scale power rooted in community; Esyllt Angharad Lewis’s multi media installation revisits a childhood VHS tape documenting a school play about the Rebecca Riots combining archive, storytelling, and performance to imagine other possible futures; Llyr Evans’s three-channel video – a man gaming alone, a piano tuner in an empty hall, and a live cattle auction- explores how systems of value, performance, and control shape our emotional and cultural realities; Gweni Llwyd’s moving image work explores quarries as spaces of possibility, creativity, and connection rather than relics of labour and loss; Sadia Pineda Hameed’s tactile installation becomes a portal, or an act of crossing borders, negotiation of identity, and transformation of the self within the context of migration.

Alongside these commissions are key works by Jeremy Deller that engage with Welsh cultural histories and vernacular myth making including The Uses of Literacy, a collection of Manic Street Preachers’s fan art, and So Many Ways to Hurt You, a documentary portrait of professional wrestler and coal miner Adrian Street accompanied by a new mural by Heidi Plant. A newly commissioned site-specific banner by long-term collaborator Ed Hall also features in the project.

Together, the exhibition asks: how do we hear the past speak, and what answers do we seek from place. Carreg Ateb: Vision or Dream? reflects on real and imagined spaces, a site of deep memory, radical tradition, and visionary futures.

Co-curated by Jeremy Deller, Kalliopi Tsipni-Kolaza, Joanna Wright and in collaboration with the young company participants at Frân Wen Theatre Company. 

The exhibition accompanies the National Gallery’s NG200: Triumph of Art, a national project by artist Jeremy Deller, which was commissioned by the National Gallery, London, as part of NG200, its Bicentenary celebrations. Triumph of Art is being developed in partnership with Mostyn in Llandudno, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee, The Box in Plymouth and The Playhouse in Derry-Londonderry. Supported by Art Fund.

Carreg Ateb: Vision or Dream? is supported by the Arts Council of Wales, Cadw and Gwynedd County Council. The exhibition at Mostyn is supported by CELF, The National Contemporary Art Gallery Wales, The Colwinston Charitable Trust, Foyle Foundation, Community Foundation Wales, Mostyn Estates and PPG Paints. 

With special thanks to The Modern Institute, Glasgow; Storiel Museum and Art Gallery, Bangor; The Llandudno Museum; The Arts Council Collection; Oriel CARN and Cyngor Conwy Council.