Each year, Oriel Colwyn takes the opportunity to support and showcase the final show group exhibitions from students completing Llandrillo College’s FdA and BA(Hons) Photography courses.
This May we introduced you to the work of the final year BA students:
Their show evidences the various genres of photography that exists within the group, as well as identifying the importance of working together to coordinate a meaningful photographic exhibition.
Opening event – Saturday 16th May.
The exhibition runs until the 6th June.
In Common Ground
Featuring:
Pauline Beacham
“This body of work presents a series of photographs of Oradour-sur-Glane, the memorial village in France that has been preserved in its ruined state, since the massacre of its inhabitants by Nazi forces in 1944. I visited Oradour-sur-Glane early in 2025 with the intention of documenting the visit and to later respond to those images as I reflected on my feelings after the trip. It’s difficult ground to somehow think about a place like this as an opportunity to take pictures. I dreaded the thought of somehow making ill-considered pictures. I wanted my images to be silent and respectful of the suffering that was ravaged upon that small community in 1944. Digital photography seemed inappropriate and so I decided to work with film. I thought about the photographs that would have been taken there before 1939. Children and families, school pictures, something in the local newspaper perhaps. It occurred to me that I should try to experience what someone using a camera from this era may have felt in the moment of making a picture. I bought an old 2 and a ¼ folding camera with zone focus and a little red window in the back for frame numbers. I had to use a light meter and slow the process right down so that all the calculations were accurate etc. I also worked in a similar fashion with an old 35mm camera. When I was there, I felt like I was walking on eggshells and that every sound was amplified. I worked hard and thought about every picture I was taking.”
© Pauline Beacham
Sophie Devonshire
“My current practice centres around ideas of landscape and what it is to live in a rural environment. From my home in Melin y Coed, Llanrwst; I can see the picture postcards all around me, but I’m not living in that view. The world is modern and technological, and I am part of it. I drive a car, I use a smartphone, and I have a digital footprint.
I choose to live in this remote landscape because I like it. I like the air, the scenery and all the obvious things, but this is not a picture — it is a feeling, and it is this that I grapple with in my work. How do I bring a modern sense of my existence into the visual panoply of landscape photography without the overburden of cliché?
My background is in science and for many years I worked as a laboratory analyst for petrochemical companies and pharmaceuticals. I looked at things very closely, searching for synthesis and anomalies. I like to see things like this — close up, almost without context — with nothing beyond the edge of the frame where the magnification ends.
Sometimes I stop, out walking or in the garden, and look at something like this: no connection to its surroundings, just the analytical scrutiny of an object in time. I take a picture and then look back at the world that surrounds me. It makes sense to puncture the view sometimes.”
David Mojoros
Visual Narratives
“This exhibition presents a body of work that explores the visual and emotional significance of the everyday. Rooted in a documentary approach, the images focus on ordinary moments, overlooked environments, and familiar subjects ranging from domestic spaces and family to streets, objects, and passing encounters. Through this, the work challenges traditional ideas of what is considered worthy of being photographed.
Influenced by photographers such as William Eggleston, Tod Hido, Eugene Meatyard, Alexey Titarenko and Stephen Shore, the project embraces colour as both a descriptive and expressive tool. Rather than using black and white to dramatise or distance, colour is used to heighten realism and draw attention to subtle details within the frame. The work adopts a quiet, observational style, allowing scenes to exist without intervention, encouraging viewers to slow down and reconsider the significance of the mundane.
The images are produced through a combination of digital and analog processes, reflecting an interest in both immediacy and materiality. This dual approach creates a dialogue between permanence and imperfection, reinforcing themes of memory, time, and personal experience. The sequencing of the work plays a key role, constructing a visual narrative that mirrors the rhythm of daily life fragmented, repetitive, yet meaningful.
Ultimately, this exhibition is not about extraordinary events, but about noticing. I invite the viewer to reflect on their own surroundings and to find value in moments that might otherwise go unseen. By elevating the everyday, the work questions how meaning is constructed through photography and how images shape our understanding of reality.”
© David Mojoros
Tesni Hunter
"I have always been surrounded by the beautiful scenery and landscapes in my life by living in Wales. So my main focus in photography has always been landscapes. I have a lot of love towards the landscape itself and find photography is a good way to capture and preserve the moment of personal tranquillity that I often feel when I am in that space.
Walking through woodland, navigating a river gorge, or being out on a coastal hill is my restoration. This is where I find the peace that counters the noise. Looking through the camera takes me to a separate place entirely. I love the complexity of the puzzle that the camera offers, to record the essence of somewhere by paying attention to the arrangement of pieces and to recognize the detail altered by a moment of light or shift towards a shadow. There is great history of the human experience that ties to place, expressed across millennia through primitive representations of site. Through my photography I wanted to express my personal feelings that I feel in these places through my passion for photography."
© Tesni Hunter
