Visual culture has been a key area of research at the Centre since the 1990s. The ‘Visual Culture of Wales’ project, led by Peter Lord, published a comprehensive history of the visual arts in Wales, which, along with the publications and online resources of subsequent projects, has transformed our understanding of visual culture in Wales.

The ‘Visual Culture of Wales’ project published a three-volume history of art in Wales in Welsh and in English between 1998 and 2003. The study adopted an inclusive approach to all kinds of visual culture from the 1500-year period up to the 1950s, including painting, drawing, sculpture, popular prints, illustration and photography, while the medieval volume also included manuscript illumination, metalwork and stained glass. These books were transformed into innovative digital editions, published on CD-ROM from 2000–4, including audio-visual contextual material such as interviews and animation.

An inclusive approach to the study of visual culture was central to a project examining visual expressions of the Bible in Wales from 1825 to 1975. ‘Imaging the Bible in Wales’ (2005–8) was led by Martin O’Kane from the Theology and Religious Studies Department at the University of Wales, Lampeter (now part of the University of Wales Trinity St David). The project was run in collaboration with the Centre and the National Library of Wales, with research undertaken by Martin Crampin and John Morgan-Guy, who had both worked on the ‘Visual Culture of Wales’ project.

‘Imaging the Bible in Wales’ pioneered new research on nineteenth and twentieth century visual art in churches in Wales, with hundreds of artworks of all kinds recorded and published on an online database. An exhibition was held at the School of Art, Aberystwyth University, in 2008, including work from the university collection and new work by contemporary artists responding to the biblical narrative. The volume Biblical Art in Wales was published in 2010 with a DVD-ROM exploring a series of themes such as the Bible and the Welsh landscape, domestic piety, and art in religious communities, using interviews with artists and experts from different disciplines.

The ‘Imaging the Bible in Wales’ project database provided the technical infrastructure that led to the publication in 2011 of a new online resource, the ‘Stained Glass in Wales’ catalogue. This expanded the collection of biblical stained glass already recorded to include medieval stained glass in Wales, as well as more recent stained glass, especially work by staff and students of the innovative course in Architectural Stained Glass at Swansea College of Art. Recent collaboration between Martin Crampin and Christian Ryan at Swansea College of Art has resulted in the cataloguing of the collection of hundreds of stained glass panels from the college archive, including examples that date back to the 1950s.

Other research projects at the Centre have focussed on aspects of visual culture within and beyond Wales. The ‘Curious Travellers’ project organised and curated an exhibition of work by contemporary artists in response to Thomas Pennant’s Tour in Wales in 2016, and published a catalogue of the exhibition in 2017. Exhibitions and publications by the project have consistently drawn attention to the work of Moses Griffith and other artists who contributed to the extra-illustrated volumes of Pennant’s writings, and a new initiative is underway to comprehensively catalogue and describe the illustrations in the extra-illustrated volumes at National Library of Wales, in collaboration with the Library and the Natural History Museum.

‘The Cult of Saints in Wales’ project toured an exhibition around cathedrals and churches that included images of saints from churches across Wales. An exhibition at the National Library of Wales in 2017 featured important hagiographic manuscripts held at the National Library of Wales, in addition to cartoons of stained glass windows and photographs of medieval images of saints. A follow-on project funded by the AHRC enabled the production of a searchable database of images of saints from locations across Wales.

Staff from the Centre working on the ‘Ports, Past and Present’ project (2019–23) commissioned visual artists and writers to produce creative responses to the port towns linking Wales and Ireland. This work resulted in a series of six exhibitions and events in Wales and Ireland, and several publications, documented on the Creative Connections website. 

Research on pre-historic visual and material culture from Atlantic Europe has remained a focus of projects and publications led by John Koch, including his work on the Tartessian relief carvings and the ‘Atlantic Europe in the Metal Ages’ project (2013–16), which produced a database of thousands of pre-historic archaeological finds. The recent ‘Rock art, Atlantic Europe, Words & Warriors’ project, funded by the Swedish Research Council, continues a multidisciplinary approach to understanding Late Bronze Age contact between Scandinavia and the Iberian Peninsula.