A new solo show, murmur, by Cardiff based artist and writer Anthony Shapland, guest-curated by Marie-Anne McQuay. The exhibition includes a new film and will be accompanied by an integrated reading space and events programme reflecting Shapland's interest in the intersection between art and writing.

Tŷ Pawb is delighted to announce a large-scale solo exhibition 'murmur' by Cardiff based artist and writer Anthony Shapland, opening Summer 2026. Anthony Shapland is a Welsh artist, founder of artist-led space g39 and novelist. Within his writing and artistic practice, he blends documentary and fiction, drawing on his lived experience of rural queerness and growing up performing straight.

Shapland was recently selected as one of The Observer’s 10 best new novelists 2025 and Waterstone’s Welsh book of the year for his debut novel A Room Above a Shop (Granta), which tells the story of hidden intimacy between two men living in a South Wales valley in the late 1980s, during the time of Section 28. Continuing to work between the gallery and the printed page, whether in image, text or film, Shapland constructs intimate portraits of lives lived at the edges of rural landscapes, often filmed on location around Bargoed, the town in the Rhymney Valley where he grew up. His ongoing fascination with illusion and mimicry, reflecting the ways in which his protagonists seek to blend in with their surroundings, manifests in his use of the hidden techniques of traditional filmmaking, including props, backdrops, filters, artificial light and Foley sound effects. These cinematic devices in turn set up and then unpack coded narratives. Speaking also to other concealed lives, the artist asks, “What happens when you stay?”

Shapland’s exhibition at Tŷ Pawb will include a new film, building on recent moving image work, including Starling Seven (2025), in which a montage of starlings copy and repeat man-made noises, and Between the Dog and the Wolf (2019) which encapsulates the artist’s interest in the cinematic illusion of shooting day for night. The exhibition will be accompanied by an integrated reading space and events programme reflecting Shapland's interest in the intersection between art and writing.

Shapland’s solo show will be guest-curated by long time peer and associate Marie-Anne McQuay, previously curator of Liverpool Biennial 2025, with Tŷ Pawb Creative Director Jo Marsh.