Atlantea

My work has always been concerned with the culture of specific places. My own ‘place’, my Welsh language background and cultural identity have been a concern because of its threatened, minority status. Other cultures where I find myself through residencies and travel have also been inspirational. Contact and interaction have been paramount in evolving new ideas about identity in the wider world. In that sense the work is site-specific, and in the drawings and assemblages made to date for exhibitions in Galicia, USA, Zimbabwe, México, Poland and Ireland, I seek to reflect on the cross referencing of cultural identity. My work is based on ‘cultural landscapes’, re constructed through a method of mark making.

Prior to making work and exhibiting I would look to ‘research’ into aspects of culture, and increasingly, a concern with globalization has become prevalent in the work. How do we protect and maintain local specificity in the face of global homogeneity? How can paintings and drawings attempt a mapping of this new world whilst maintaining an authenticity and singularity? How do we keep our ‘voices’ unique in a world of easy replication? The drawings/paintings and assemblages of objects might in fact qualify as a form of ‘research’, ‘field-notes’ perhaps, linking ideas. I sometimes think of them as visual essays, where ideas are introduced and extrapolated. They then provide a basis for the viewer’s thoughts to travel. I often see this capacity in atlases and map-books too, creating imagined spaces from the symbolic depiction of real ones.