Artist Residency Part 2

National Library of Wales

In the first of my blog posts about my Welsh residency I described part of the No Welsh Art exhibition at the National Library of Wales. Another section of the exhibition that resonated with me also pertained to Welsh Identity, History, Myth and Legend.

In this section was a familiar character.

This is Blodewedd (c2003) by Welsh painter Ivor Davies. Blodewedd which means Flower Faced was made from the flowers of oak, broom and meadowsweet. She was in intended to be the bride for a hero. But Blodewedd had ideas of her own and fell in love with a rival Lord. The complex story is part of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi a much loved collection of early Welsh tales. I grew up in North Wales on Anglesey and vividly remember these stories being told in school.

When I was applying and thinking about the residency I thought I would revisit this story and make and make work relating to it, as I had in a residency in Portugal 11 years ago. But it was February…and flowers were few and far between! I was keen to make something other than a painting and local clay was something that interested me very much along with the idea of returning to the land where I grew up.

Collecting Clay

On a bright blue winters day three days into my residency a local artist knocked on my cottage door and invited me to collect clay from a source that she had found in a local stream. Together we gathered buckets and a spade and set off following the stream. When we reached a shallow bend my guide said the clay was here but she couldn’t see it. However, she soon did as the next step took her knee deep in the stuff!

I have few photos as from then on we filled the buckets and got covered with clay. The buckets were very heavy and the path back much longer than the path to the clay! Back at the art residency my very patient teacher showed me how to sieve the clay through a series of ever finer sieves to remove the stones. It was hard, cold and backbreaking work but the sun shone and we had plenty of tea, cake and chocolate breaks. I’m so grateful to her for her local knowledge and generosity.

Each day I put some of the wet clay on a plaster bat to dry out. By scraping that clay into small rock shapes that I then use to hold the stems of the winter vegetation I was slowly making a winter meadow. Around the residency are areas of rewilding land. Already the number of species exceed my expectations. The mindful meditative quality of forming the clay and collecting stems daily is something I look forward to. And it’s ongoing until I run out of clay!

This is about half of my meadow so far.

"Fe godwn ni eto", "We will rise again"

In the last blog post I mentioned that there was a second slogan written on the wall of the derelict cottage. Like the first it has a history.

"Fe godwn ni eto", is Welsh for "We will rise again"

It’s the motto of the Free Wales Army an organisation formed 1965 in nearby Lampeter as a protest against the construction of the Llyn Celyn reservoir and flooding of the Welsh valley mentioned in Part 1.

Peering over the wall of the cottage to see this painted among the dried vegetation I knew this is what I wanted to call my meadow of clay and grasses. A testament to the power of nature to regenerate.

There is third part of this tale and maybe even a fourth but for now I’m forming clay and collecting spent stems that have shed their seed but will rise again.

More from the blog …

Buttercups: The Art and Science

Knapweed, Nature’s Resilient Marvel