Steve Brockett: To Carry and Be Carried
Steve’s semi-abstract canvases are distilled thoughts, thick with symbolic figures and animals, historic references and mythical reimagining.
Steve Brockett’s exhibition extends its reach beyond the physical landscape into the complex terrain of our relations in the living world — it speaks about the bonds between human and animal, and the care, burden, intimacy, and strain that define those connections. Just as our emotional attachments shape how we inhabit the world, his paintings reveal how landscapes can inhabit us in return. In Carried and Be Carried, memory and intuition merge like interdependent lives, giving rise to an inner geography of empathy and tension. Through shifting layers of colour and abstraction, Steve traces not only the contours of Almería’s desert and rural Wales but also the psychological landscapes of attachment — those places where connection carries weight, and where care becomes both shelter and tether. His work invites viewers to sense this reciprocity: the way we carry the places and creatures we love, even as they, in turn, carry us.
NEW WORKS BY STEVE BROCKETT AND COLIN DAVIES AT ORIEL CANFAS, CARDIGAN
Exhibition: Where the Land Carries Us
Artists: painters Steve Brockett & Colin Davies
Venue: Oriel Canfas, Cardigan
Dates: 2–30 May 2026
Drinks reception & Meet the Artists: Saturday 2 May, 1–3pm
As summer light lengthens over the hills of West Wales, Oriel Canfas is proud to present Where the Land Carries Us, two interconnected exhibitions bringing together the work of painters Steve Brockett & Colin Davies. Though distinct in their concerns—Davies summoning the raw elemental force of Wales itself, Brockett charting the quiet and complex bonds between living creatures and the landscapes they inhabit—their works meet in a shared conviction: that place is never merely a backdrop. It lives in us, shapes us, and asks something of us in return. Colin Davies paints Wales as it sounds and feels before it can be named, and where he works outward, Steve Brockett reflects on his time living in Almeria and moves inward beyond the physical landscape into the complex terrain of our relations in the living world.
“We wanted to bring together two artists whose work, though very different in surface and subject, shares a deep attentiveness to what landscape does to us—not just what it looks like, but how it moves through us and what it asks us to carry.” — James Horan, Director, Oriel Canfas
Placed together at Oriel Canfas, these two bodies of work illuminate each other with unexpected force. Davies gives form to the outer weather of Wales—its drama, its grandeur, its relentless change—while Brockett attends to the inner weather it provokes: the way the land lodges in the body, in memory, in the bonds we form with the creatures who share it with us. One paints what the eye encounters; the other traces what the heart carries home.
Where the Land Carries Us offers visitors a layered encounter with Wales as both lived experience and living force—a place that endures not only in its stones and shorelines, but in the art, the bonds, and the inner lives it continues to inspire.
Oriel Canfas, at Manchester House, Grosvenor Hill, Cardigan SA43 1HY, welcomes visitors from near and far. The exhibition runs from 2 to 30 May 2026, with a drinks reception on Bank Holiday weekend Saturday 2 May, 1–3pm, offering a warm opportunity to meet both artists and celebrate this new chapter in the gallery's programme.
