Exhibition runs: 11 July – 31 October 2026
Preview and Press View: 10 July 2026
Press Launch & Lunch 1-3pm, Evening Preview 5.30pm – 7.30pm
murmur
A low voice. A chant, or a prayer, a rumour. A sound not meant to be heard. Things not to be said.
Tŷ Pawb is delighted to present murmur, a large-scale solo exhibition by artist and writer Anthony Shapland in summer 2026. Shapland is a Welsh artist, acclaimed novelist, and founder of artist-led space g39 in Cardiff. His output as a writer and artist builds on his sense that the world is constructed in the same way as a film set – constantly evolving and temporary.
murmur draws on the artist’s lived experience of rural queerness and growing up performing straight. The exhibition includes two new works: a single channel film Sleeper (2026) and a light and sound sequence ‘Night after night before day’ (2026). These are combined with new iterations of recent moving image works Seven Starling (2025) and Between the Dog and the Wolf, (2019).
As well as a sound not meant to be heard, murmur is also a nod to the murmuration or synchronized aerial display where flocks of starlings wheel, twist, and turn in unison, creating complex, shape-shifting patterns in the sky, typically just before dusk in winter. Arch imitators of voices and electronic noise, starlings are an enduring fascination for Shapland. Their capacity for mimicry is a parallel for hiding in plain sight, adapting to surroundings and blending in.
Outside the gallery, a daily sequence of studio lights shine in through narrow windows, mimicking the fluctuation between dawn and dusk, sequenced with a soundtrack. This is Night after night before day (2026), a new artwork which adds to a sense of being held between day and night which shapes so many of the art works – the feeling of possibility, of expectation. Night after night before day adds to the set-like nature of the show, building on Shapland’s fascination with the illusion of film.
A new large-scale, single channel film Sleeper (2026) has also been made for murmur. The film opens on a typical life drawing class of a 20th century art school, a male model at the centre, easels and props and paraphernalia. The first of his family to go to college, Shapland found it a formative experience, a place that allowed for a different kind of looking.
The model is specifically posed – a homage to Wales born, American artist Sylvia Sleigh’s groundbreaking 1970s nude studies – the feminist gaze directed at the male nude. Shapland found himself also mimicking, watching and fitting into the rituals and routines of art college by observing peers more at ease with its codes and routines. In Sleeper the class is punctuated by the arrival of starlings – an inquisitive out-of-place intrusion to the scene and the intensity of the concentration of the model to ‘hold-pose’.
Around the central film Sleeper, iterations and re-inventions of previous works are installed. These include a new version of moving image work Between the Dog and the Wolf, (2019) split across three screens and presented amongst the props of an art-school, as well as filmic lighting gels and filters. This multi-screen work sits in its own structured ‘copse’, glimpsed through beech-wood of the easels. Between the Dog and the Wolf, (2019) is a growing collection of observations, influences and ideas which changes each time it’s shown: a playful series of notes, chapters and thoughts without a beginning or an end. Sound also bleeds gently into the gallery from Seven Starling, (2025), a found-footage montage of starlings imitating man-made sounds accompanied by sculptures; above eye level are a series of handmade nests filled with imitation starling eggs, mimicking the act of roosting in the gallery environment.
The exhibition contains an integrated reading space with texts chosen by the artist and a pamphlet featuring newly commissioned writing by Maria Fusco, a working-class writer from Belfast, writing across critical and performance works. She is Professor of Interdisciplinary Writing at the University of Dundee.; Dylan Huw, writer and critic, and Naomi Pearce, interdisciplinary scholar writing across fiction, art and performance, all of whom reflect Shapland’s interest in working between the space of art and writing. A limited number will be available each week to take away for free. murmur also connects audiences to Shapland’s work with fiction; his debut novel, A Room Above a Shop, as well as Welsh adaptation, Lan Stâr, written in dialogue with poet and artist Esyllt Angharad Lewis, are available to borrow from the gallery as part of Shapland’s Honesty Library.
Books, film props, art school easels, nests and birds are all present within murmur – balancing the tensions between nature and culture, wildness and learned behavior.
murmur is guest curated by independent curator Marie-Anne McQuay with Creative Director Jo Marsh, Tŷ Pawb.
