Wild Waters of Eryri is an exhibition of watercolour paintings on show at Cletwr, Tre’r-ddôl from Wednesday, 23 August.

Artist Piera Cirefice is a freelance illustrator and creative with a BA (Hons) degree in illustration from Falmouth University. She grew up in the Mourne Mountains in Ireland and now lives in Goginan, in the hills east of Aberystwyth.

Piera spends a lot of her time painting the landscape of Eryri where she also enjoys cold-water swimming. She finds that the meditative experience of immersing herself in the fluidity of river and lake water adds to her understanding of nature and of its beneficial effects.

Through working on her paintings outdoors (en plein air), Piera explains that she “hopes to capture the atmosphere of the living landscape, creating a sense of immediacy by documenting my personal response to the landscape at that moment in time”.

An important influence on her work is the writing of Scottish author and environmentalist Nan Shepherd who, in the 1930s and ‘40s, immersed herself in the mountain environment of the Cairngorms.

Nan’s book, The Living Mountain, is an inspirational account of experiencing a mountain environment. Piera explains that a similar love of the wild and mythical landscape of Eryri allows her to go out into nature and to look inwards into herself.

The paintings in the Cletwr exhibition depict a landscape of rocks, waterfalls, and twisting streams in which the delicate colours and subtle forms suggest the underlying fragility of this rugged environment.

Wild Waters of Eryri is at Cletwr from 23 August until 16 October.