"This exhibition allowed me an opportunity to bring together various related themes that have occupied my thoughts and made themselves real in my artworks over the years. Mission gallery has a unique and special atmosphere that cannot help but influence artworks placed there.

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I wanted to populate the room with my tissue paper characters, fragile figures who would act as vessels, containers for the thoughts and feelings of those who came to visit.

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There is a void, a spiritual emptiness. We are lost. My intention was to allow the visitor to find their Hortus Conclusus, their Enclosed Garden, a sympathetic space in which to think, feel and remember."

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Keith Bayliss

Hortus Conclusus: The Enclosed Garden 2012

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With Thanks:

Amanda, Hannah and Emma and staff at Mission. Joe Bayliss for his soundscape. Clive Hicks-Jenkins for his essay. Little voices from Sketty Primary School. Sally Moss for the "In Conversation". David Thomas for his poetry . Thomas Smith and Inger Richenberg photography.

Read also: Space as Sanctuary by Ceri Thomas in Planet

May 2012 ISSN 0048-4288 www.planetmagazine.org.uk

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Photographs of the exhibition are by the kind permission of Thomas Smith

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Photographs of the opening and closing event are by Inger Richenberg