John Rowley (Wales) has worked as an artist and an actor for the past 20 years. He makes work across a wide range of media including theatre, performance, film, sculpture and illustration. Reared in Essex, he has now been resident in Wales since 1990, initially working for the renowned site-specific theatre company, BRITH GOF. In addition to his solo practice he also makes art and performance works with colleague, Richard Huw Morgan as part of good cop bad cop and is an associate performer with the Sheffield-based experimental performance group, Forced Entertainment. In the summer of 2012 he was cast in a National Theatre of Wales’ production of Coriolanus and is about to develop his second children’s book for a well known publisher.
The Dark Sounds For A City (2004) series of films form part of a larger body of live performance and lens-based works, inspired by 1970’s and 80‘s BBC Sound Effects LPs (on vinyl and in mono, for amateurs). Commissioned by BBC Wales as part of Mad, Bad & Dangerous, its ‘artists-make-films-for-tv-transmission’ scheme, the intention was to create a number of micro-length narrative ‘dramas’ to be screened in the gaps between the channel’s scheduled programming.The results appear as incidents that could be seen to have been lifted from part of a larger project, at a point immediately ‘post-impact’, where we can only guess at what has been and what will potentially follow.
These films were some of the earliest shot on HD by BBC Wales (although never screened in HD) by Bafta Award Winning cinematographer, Rob Hardy.
