Opening today (Friday) at 7.30 pm are three exhibitions in Narberth's Oriel Q at the Queen's Hall.

In the main gallery is an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Catherine Roche and David Fitzjohn, called 'Uncertain Journeys'. In this body of work, both artists engage with the notion of the journey as a means to explore individual interests and ideas. While their work is driven by differing themes, there is an underlying thread present throughout, that of time and human consequence. While Roche journeys between past and present within her work through memory and reflection, Fitzjohn ponders the environmental future and its implications in his paintings; both are journeys of uncertainty.

The journeys in David Fitzjohn's paintings are ones of potential transformation and relate to impending climate change. In his work, natural forms and the landscape, especially wilderness and woodland, are used as metaphors for both a lost ideal (Elysium) and a hoped for future. Animals migrate in search of an environment that has been destroyed; environments themselves mutate.

Recently, the simple act of attempting to paint rain, with its implied impossibilities, has become a metaphor for the overwhelming power of nature and its indifference to human endeavour, highlighting our uncertain future. Simultaneously, the paintings also operate on a purely formal level. They are about the language of colour and its powerful, manipulative and seductive nature.

For Catherine Roche, the notion of a journey provides a route through history where past and present overlap and connect. Temporal space is navigated through landscape and objects. Physical journeys made by walking a repeated route provide a source to record and contemplate a changing experience and passing time.

Through repeated drawing she revisits these journeys, the process of making representing for her the ephemeral nature of memory and experience - affirming, removing, retrieving; exposing a network of traces. These pieces are a form of mapping, negotiating and editing, inscribing the essential.

In the 'Object Drawing' series, landscape and objects merge as decorative motifs engulf the picture space. An ongoing interest in objects as potential conduits for memory and imagination and as symbols of continuum motivates this work. While an object remains static, it journeys through time, a container for a physically tangible 'history', its resonance adapting to its user. These drawings are shards and fragments of temporal and uncertain journeys.

In Oriel Fach, there is an exciting site specific mixed media installation by Wedge Crimson, a collective of three emerging ceramic artists spontaneously thinking outside the kiln. 

The group of recent graduates from UWIC is formed by Natalia Dias, now a resident of fireworks studios in Cardiff, Josh Redman who recently became a member of Wobage workshops in Herefordshire, and Lloyd Davies whose following on to do his MA at UWIC. 

On the stairs, there is a selection of photographs from photography students on the BA course at West Wales School of Art, Carmarthen.

The exhibitions run until Saturday, October 3.

The gallery is open Wednesday - Saturday, 10 am - 5 pm.