AN exhibition with the intriguing title 'The Sea-End of Town' opens tomorrow (Saturday) at Tenby Museum and Art Gallery. The exhibition is of recent work by Susan Sands and the title is taken from Dylan Thomas's 'Under Milk Wood'.

On display in this sale exhibition are a number of exciting and vibrant collages and prints with the predominant theme of 'the sea.'

Leaving Reading University with a degree in Fine Arts in 1957, Susan Sands worked for the City Art Galleries, Sheffield until 1959, after which she moved abroad with her family and worked in ceramics in Malta and book illustration in Singapore.

Back in London for the next 20 years, she was a founder member of the Greenwich Printmakers Association, at whose gallery she shows her etchings, lithographs, monoprints and collagraphs, and through whom her work has also been seen and bought in New Zealand, Canada and USA.

She has exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, the Royal Water Colour Society's Contemporary British Water Colours and the Whitechapel Open (1983, 1984 and 1987). In 1986 she had a one-woman show in Canada at Maple Ridge, Vancouver.

Susan's work has been included in exhibitions organised by the Printermakers' Council at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, the Royal Festival Hall and the Barbican (1993). As Artist-in-Residence at the British/American Drama Association's Summer School at Oxford for several years, she made drawings at master-classes of famous theatre personalities. These were shown at the Barbican and were part of the large 1989 one-woman show at Artspace in the Parkshot Centre, Richmond.

In 1990 she helped to organise and took part in the first Anglo-Russian Printmakers' exchange exhibition after 'Perestroika' at Woodlands Art Gallery, Blackheath and Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham, and its companion show in the House of Artists at the Tretyakov Art Gallery in Moscow.

In 1990 Susan's family moved to Pembrokeshire where her studio overlooks the estuary of the River Cleddau, though her continued membership of the Greenwich Printmakers has meant her prints being included in the Barbican Contemporary Printmaking exhibition for three years and the Curwen Gallery in 1997. In 1996 the Sea Empress oil disaster inspired a series of prints in the travelling exhibition 'Artists Against Pollution,' culminating in a large work in the Aberystwyth University Arts Centre Open 1997.

Several one-woman shows have followed in Wales and her work was selected in 1999 for the fifth time for the National Eisteddfod. Her large triptych of the Cleddau estuary was included in Tenby Museum and Art Gallery's Millennium exhibition 'Women Artists and Pembrokeshire' in 1999.

For the last few years Susan has tutored art courses at the National Maritime Museum and Somerset House, and in November 2000 she won the annual prize at the National Society of Painters, Printmakers and Sculptors exhibition at Whiteleys Atrium Gallery in Bayswater.

This year, for the seventh year running, Susan will be the painter/printmaker at the Fine Arts and Crafts show at the Cathedral Hall, St. Davids in late August, and looks forward to a solo exhibition in March 2003 at the Barbican Library in London.

Susan Sands writes of this exhibition:

"'I can see the sea' is what every urban child shouts on nearing their holiday destination.

"It's that feeling of excitement and release from everyday tensions as you first put a foot in the water, feel the first wave break against your shins and the soft sand melt under your toes that I have tried to capture in some of the pictures on show.

"I have chosen collage as the technique for the bulk of my work as it's one of those methods where the actual means has a habit of surprising the artist (rather like printmaking does). The papers can be moved about on the surface until - 'eureka'! they are telling the story for you. The sea is breaking into all sorts of colours, the figures disappearing into the sunlight. Faced with a painting taking over like this, all the artist can do is to sit back and say 'Well, that's how I really saw it all along!'"

'The Sea-End of Town' continues at Tenby Museum and Art Gallery until June 22. Open seven days a week 10 am - 5 pm.

An artist's workshop by Susan Sands will be held at the museum on Friday, May 10, from 11 am - 3 pm. Those intending to join the workshop (for which there is no charge) are asked to contact the museum.