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"Yn Fy Ngwaed," Welsh for "In My Blood," is an extraordinarily fine exhibit now at the Fraser Gallery in Bethesda. In association with the Welsh Assembly Government, the show introduces the work of six contemporary artists working in various media. Although distinct, a common thread connects them: their homeland in Wales and its people.

Like Ireland, Wales is a place of great natural beauty with ranges of misty mountains, crystal lakes, green coastal plains and silvery skies. Its history is also filled with hardship and systematic oppression of its national culture and language. Although most associated with poetry and music, the Fraser exhibit shows that Wales has a vital visual arts community strongly connected to its national character and contemporary issues.

Carwyn Evan is most concerned with the decline of rural areas as young people flock to the cities for work. Her five plywood house-shaped structures perched on stands occupy the center of the gallery. Each contains a diorama of a rural site under threat, including a country school, a church and a farmhouse in ruin. Comprising an installation with the title "Everything seemed so simple and beautiful," the dioramas exude the sense of abandon of the very things that amounted to the identity of a country that has experienced broad social and political shifts in recent decades. The theme is personal for the artist who, as he says, "(im)migrated" from his rural origins to Cardiff, the capital of Wales and its largest city. The house-like structures with their miniature landscapes set the tone for the exhibit as a whole: somewhat nostalgic, but nevertheless powerfully moving, and not without a feeling of persistent hope in the face of despair.

Andrew Johnson's photography explores the people and places of the declining Welsh coal mining industry, which, along with the cargo ports, had been the basis of the economy for more than two centuries. His series of large black and white digital pigment prints, the result of a four-year essay completed in 1993, documents the lives and work of the miners of the Taff Merthyr colliery in South Wales. While clearly showing the poverty of these workers and their surroundings, these powerful images focus on their enduring camaraderie and on the cold. The cold air is almost tactile in these pictures. The photo "Fire Life #2" shows the back of a miner dressed in a ragged coat, warming his hands by an open coal crate fire. Aesthetically, the photo is superb, its composition and tone in perfect balance. The same can be said of another, "Relics," which shows an old sink and kitchen board with dishes on it, and a ruined mirror above it reflecting the face of a miner not otherwise visible. In "Fire Life #2," the tuft of fire coming out of the coal looks like something white and magical, life-giving heat in the bleakness of the scene.

Iwan Gwyn Parry and Darren Hughes paint the Welsh landscape. The lowland skies seem to press down on both these artists' works, resulting in small horizontal formats without much color. Parry's painting technique is thick, with impasto swipes that create a relief effect, whereas Hughes' four paintings are very detailed views of the landscape in and around his home in Bethesda (Wales). The grays and deep blues of "the houses, the gates and the stone walls and slate fences" are dominant in Hughes' palette, while the small scale of the works requires and satisfies close viewing.

Two videos by Helen Grove-White tackle the environmental problems uniate to a place surrounded by risings seas — except for its eastern border with England. "Rising Slowly" attempts to connote the erosion of Welsh coastlines by showing raindrops very slowly raising the level of water in a tank, drop by drop. "On the Brink" is more interesting visually, with layered views of the waves over Bardsey Island just off the northwestern corner of Wales, which is sinking beneath them. The sea has formed a deep depression, which will eventually cause the island to break in half, and finally disappear from view under the waters. In the meantime, the island has an almost human form, making the video's imagery all the more poignant.

On a slightly lighter note, Jessica Lloyd-Jones' coal spheres contain worlds of plants and glowing life within them. This is the place of most hope in this exhibit. There it is: a small sphere of black coal, with a lens on it, and a switch. When you flip the switch and look inside, a plethora of small plant life from Wales is visible. It looks light green in the special light within, algae and such, but calls our minds to life's unfailing potential.