“Joyful Unorthodoxy”
Alan Dunn: marchnad / market
at Tŷ Pawb – Reviewed

Integral to the fabric of Wrexham, markets new and old are celebrated in a new exhibition at Tŷ Pawb, the city’s contemporary arts centre sharing space with its stalls. Denise Courcoux investigates…

Markets are integral to the built fabric of Wrexham; the North Wales city hosts three permanent indoor markets within a stone’s throw of each other, still holding out against the ubiquitous discount chains of the nearby high street. Tŷ Pawb (translated from Welsh as ‘Everybody’s House’), which occupies the ground floor of a multi-storey car park, is the unruly younger sibling to the Victorian Butchers’ and General Markets. It opened in 2018, the result of a transformation of the 1990s People’s Market into a refreshed market hall, with a contemporary arts centre sharing space with the stalls. It is a union that stirred some controversy locally – I visited Wrexham while Tŷ Pawb was being developed, and someone had put up posters scoffing that people who want art go to places like Chester – but the aspiration was that each could benefit from the other’s visitors.

The gallery is currently host to marchnad / market by Merseyside-based artist Alan Dunn, who collaborated previously on the Sgt. Pepper’s-style billboard of market traders next to its entrance. This exhibition also looks to the surrounding stallholders. It is primarily focused around a film projected onto two large, free-standing screens, angled towards each other like an open book (top). The right-hand screen displays a reel of historic black-and-white footage of Wrexham’s streets and markets – a glimpse into yesteryear – while the left-hand screen plays a 40-minute film by Dunn of contemporary Tŷ Pawb, and more particularly, the people who keep it alive. It’s a collage of a film with an experimental, DIY feel, shot primarily on phones and interspersed with clips from the traders’ social media.

This new film takes us on a virtual tour of the market, showing off its colourful, pick-and-mix variety as the stalls are introduced in turn, with each trader’s mini-film given a distinct flavour. The ingredients used by Curry on the Go (whose luscious Chicken Palak alone is worth the visit) have been illustrated by Dunn’s art students at Leeds Beckett University, with animated cinnamon sticks and wrinkled chillis dancing across the screen. A rather lovely surreal segment showcases the wares of another food stall, The PIE’d PIE’per. It follows the adventures of a pie (in case you hadn’t guessed) as it’s selected, popped into a paper bag, and taken on a train journey to Chester, eventually ending up on a plate to face its end, while the paper bag is given a reprieve as an origami crane.

The handmade quality of many of the goods sold in markets like Tŷ Pawb’s is highlighted, with numerous segments showing hands at work. We see the complete process of making a little wooden sign in Siop Siwan, a retailer specialising in Welsh-language cards and gifts; from cutting and sanding the timber, to designing and applying the transfer. In another section of the film, the skilled hand of a tailor is repeated in close-up, pushing fabric through a sewing machine. I passed RTO Alterations as I walked through the market afterwards, and past a seamstress busy at work. Markets bring us close to the hands and the labour behind the goods we buy and consume, in a way that seems almost anachronistic now when so much is pre-packaged, and you can easily buy a new outfit without encountering another human. Labour is a thread binding this contemporary video to the older film; hands shovelling soil in the past, and shovelling sweets in the present.

The historic footage of old Wrexham is presented without context, but broadly shows work in the name of progress and change; earth is turned over, ladders are carried, and the bricks of a pub are pulled down. The interspersed footage of Wrexham’s markets in years gone by, in contrast, has a slower, nostalgic quality. The signage might look a little different, but the goods are remarkably similar to those still on show in the stalls outside the gallery: sweets, handbags, carpets, children’s clothes, make-up. In a world that changes at a dizzying pace – illustrated by the fact the exhibition blurb notes short AI sequences in the film, presumably where still images of the traders become animated – markets, and the material goods they sell that sustain and decorate our individual worlds, offer a steadying hand.

The new film of contemporary Tŷ Pawb also uses found footage, in the form of the market traders’ social media; an indication of the extra work they need to do these days to attract custom, whether online or in real life. Small rectangles showcasing the rainbow weaves of Hair by Renia scroll upwards in their hundreds while digital confetti falls past in the opposite direction, and a model smiles at the screen, flicking her shiny orange wig. The ambient music that soundtracks the entire film adds to the dreamy, kaleidoscopic quality. Composed by local musician Meilir Tomos, synthesised pulses and bleeps are combined with audio recordings collected from around the building, most of which are manipulated beyond recognition, although I caught some spoken Welsh.

The exhibition space is signalled by a neon sign announcing its title, marchnad / market, which will remain as a permanent dual-language indicator of Tŷ Pawb’s union of market- and art-space. Displayed alongside the film is a small pop-up market stall with an array of related items such as pin badges and activity sheets for visitors to pick up. Among them is a zine produced by The Dispensary Gallery, a Wrexham-based curatorial duo, which showcases the traders’ expertise in the form of tips, recommendations and recipes, alongside a refreshingly spiky, incisive editorial pitching the market as ‘a site of precarity and resistance’.

Indeed, it is a small miracle that markets are still going despite the myriad and mounting pressures they face. This exhibition explores what keeps customers coming back to them; the people in Dunn’s film clearly run their businesses with deep care. Market stalls offer a community and close connection to their goods that is very different to the experience in chain stores, and marchnad / market celebrates the sheer hard work and joyful unorthodoxy keeping them here.

Denise Courcoux

marchnad / market is at Tŷ Pawb, Wrexham, until 26 April 2025