A RAGLAN artist will represent Wales at a major international arts exhibition which starts in Italy next week.

Work by Helen Sear, who works at the University of South Wales in Newport, will be showcased at the Venice Biennale, which opens on May 9. She is the first woman to be picked to represent Wales at the event with a solo exhibition.

...the rest is smoke will feature five new works and will be revealed to the press next Thursday.

The title of the exhibition is taken from an inscription in Andrea Mantegna’s last painting of Saint Sebastian, now housed in the Ca’ d’Oro in Venice.

And the artist said: “Mantegna’s painting of Saint Sebastian is about mortality and was found in his studio after his own death. There’s a candle in the painting that’s just been snuffed out and around it there’s this little inscription that roughly translates: ‘nothing is stable if not divine, the rest is smoke’.

“I really like the idea of ‘the rest is smoke’ and beyond the specific meaning in the painting it took me to a world of illusion and looking and perception; and that’s something I’ve tried to embed in all the new works I have created for Wales in Venice.”

The exhibition was commissioned and will be managed by the Arts Council of Wales and Wales Arts International and has backing from the Welsh Government and the British Council.

The festival showcases contemporary art and includes specific events around Venice for art, dance, architecture, cinema and theatre.

It has been held every other year since 1895 and will showcase art from 53 different countries until it closes in November.

The Reader in Film, Photography and Digital Media first moved to Wales in 1984 after studying at the University of Reading and Slade School at University College London.

Last year she exhibited at the fifth edition of Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie en Gaspesié in Quebec, Canada.

Her photographs were widely used in the British Council exhibition, De-Composition: Constructed Photography in Britain, which toured Latin America and Eastern Europe in 1991.

Other critically acclaimed work was also featured in the About Face exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2004 and La Mirada Reflexiva at the Espai D’Art Contemporani in Castellon, Spain a year later.

She has also held solo exhibitions in Finland, Cardiff and Stuttgart. Her first major monograph was published in 2012.