Maenir: Sounding the mists of time.

This is my entry for the Wales Contemporary/Cymru Gyfoes open exhibition. The exhibition has been delayed from earlier in the year by COVID, but is going ahead in the autumn and early next year. The theme is “Inspired by Wales”. I’d got a number of ideas in my head, but I wasn’t convinced by them. I wanted something that was the Wales I grew up in, or rather the Wales that was in my head at that time.

There’s an animism at the back of Welshness. As if the very stones are possessed of life. A Maenir (standing stone) watches over a field near where I grew up. It was one of the stations of a local history field trip when I was at primary school. I’m sure it’s not as monstrous big as my 9-year-old self remembers it. But it’s big enough.

Local legend had it that once a year at Christmas time, the stone got up and walked the couple of miles to the sea for a drink. Maybe a relic of the old animism that planted it there.

So here she is, feeling thirsty, sat among the fading attempts to overwrite her existence. No doubt she had sisters, but they’ve gone now, along with the monks and miners, the fortresses and foundries.

Welsh culture always seemed predominantly verbal. It speaks and sings its place in the world. So my Maenir’s environment is a verbal one, a ruined castle made of words. The past and present of the little world I grew up in. All past now. But the Maenir still stands.

I wanted the word “Maenir”, too. But I wanted it to be typographically different from the background text, not just a different colour. The letters I used are from the Bodvoc stone, a late Roman memorial stone that was discovered at Margam, not far from this Maenir.

I think the medium of woodcut lends itself to the subject matter. The texture, the recalcitrant material, the whole execution felt more… primitive. Though of course we know it’s not.