Finding Common Ground
Cymru 2024-2025
An exploration as part of a year long Future Wales Fellowship opportunity supported by
Arts Council Wales and Natural Resources Wales, with Peak Cymru, National Trust, and Elan Valley Trust.
The Future Wales Fellowship was an invitation to go deep with creative research into our connection with nature – whilst acknowledging of course that we ourselves are nature. Over the year I set out to explore material and ritual, letting the materials of the land and sea lead my inquiry, and seeking out rituals past and present that those materials offer us. I’m interested in native and sustainable materials that can teach us something about where we are and bring us into a closer relationship with place, as being within, rather than on, stewarding, conquering, or using… and in working with these materials by hand – skin to skin, to meet them in a tactile relationship. The evolution of a coracle has been the framework for this enquiry.
My research process involved making prototypes and structures in response to materials and places; exploring possibilities for co-building and co-creating with each other as humans and with the more than human world; and exploring opportunities for healing our relationship with the rest of nature through accessible land, sea and sky based rituals and celebrations that reconnect us to the cycles of the moon, the sun and the seasons.
I’ve been guided on my journey by the question “what can you show me?” which has opened up surprise dialogues and exchanges with those I met on the way, both human and more than human; and by the mode of a drift (as suggested by the coracle), following where the currents take me and allowing tributaries to suggest new directions.
The drift has led me towards “edge” spaces of the physical and temporal; to pilgrimage and what it means to be in spiritual connection with place; to growing, harvesting and working with flax, willow, elm, ash, lime and seaweed and better understanding their life cycles; to community celebrations of hay and summer solstice and the magic of gathering with fire and music; to permaculture design and a weaving in of this understanding of interconnected systems and care to my artistic practice; and, to the eventual creation of a coracle as a ritual object and nest – a cynefin in which to be safe before the edge (of climate crisis), to acknowledge the hugeness of which we are a part, and to rediscover the wild within.
The coracle led me on journeys to the edges of day and night, land and sky at Moelyci; to the shifting edges of land and sea at Newborough; and on a conversational journey through Cwm Idwal. It became a tool for connecting people with place and rediscovering a more sensorial language and way of being in the world.
Following the Fellowship, I am looking at future journeys to explore with the coracle, and at how it becomes an invitation to others, including plans for co-building and journeying with communities. I am developing a short film which documents the journey on Moelyci, and am seeking the right context to share this. I am also developing a series of walking scores and guided walks to the Edges of place and time, and how these might be used to form a deeper more sensorial connection to the environment we exist within, including finding re-enchantment with the night. My work continues to seek out ways to bring others together in collective celebration of this land we are part of, through the creation of gathering places and new rituals for our time.
Work in progress was shared at Stiwdio Cadnant in Caernarfon on 27th March, alongside Manon Awst.
The sun spills and splits over the edge of the mountain, melting a warm wet yoke of yellow dawn over the ridge that makes every particle of life glow.
A surprise radiance of light and energy pours out as ...
All our edges blur, mine, the mountain, and the sky.
Photos 1,3, & 8 by myself, 2,6 & 7 by Ben Walker, and 4 & 5 by Joseph Conran