August is here and that can only mean its time for Colony 14 to roll into Cardigan. This year’s show will be bigger and broader than either of the two previous years with more artists than ever and more sites across the town being turned into temporary contemporary art galleries.

This year will once again see Bridge Warehouse above the old fforest store and café site playing host to Colony’s main exhibition. This year the exhibition will include some very big names from the visual arts scene including renowned Welsh artist Iwan Bala. However, Colony is committed to promoting all the best bits of contemporary Welsh art regardless of whether its makers are firmly established or still students and the exhibition will include the best work from across the board.

This year’s exhibition will also feature for the first time ever a brand new exhibition curated and brought to Cardigan by Swansea’s Elysium gallery. Elysium’s director Jonathan Powell has carefully selected some of Swansea finest artists to bring along to the show which will be called Shore Leave and will see the artists responding to the theme with both new and existing work. The exhibition will be staged at Pantywylan on Cambrian Quay by fforest pizza tipi and will feature eighteen of Elysium’s very best new artists.

Alongside the two main exhibitions this year Colony will also be playing host to the biggest number of satellite events yet with a whole host of talks, workshops and art events happening across Cardigan town. Foremost among these is well known Cardiff based artist David Shepherd’s residency at ‘The Yard’. The yard in question is a space behind the buildings on Cambrian Quay which is used for storage and waste from the various buildings there. Shepherd has been resident there for ten days creating a site-specific work which uses existing elements of the site along with introduced art objects.

Colony really does see the cutting edge in contemporary Welsh art brought to Cardigan with its standing, reputation and draw growing year on year as organizer Lee Williams brings more and more inventive and extensive projects to the event.

There will be talks going on at Small World Theatre and Pantwylan and other events taking place at Bookends in the arcade and the Eagle Pub. The exhibition runs from Wednesday 20th August to the 1st of September and details of all the various exhibitions, events and opening times can be found on the website www.colonyprojects.co.uk.