Ransoming Sanity

“In a world gone bad, a bear … is a comforting, uncomplicated, dependable hunk of sanity.” Pam Brown

Part One

It’s the 1st of December, the start of Advent, and I am at a Christmas Fayre which is being held to raise money for a charity. Towards the end of the afternoon I notice an elderly lady, who has been helping out on the bric-a-brac table, wandering about the room as if she is looking for someone particular. She is holding a small teddy bear close to her chest. I watch her with the experience of a person who has spent their working life in the NHS and I get ready to spring into action if she starts to look distressed or disorientated. Almost as if she hears my thoughts, she stops walking towards the door, turns and her eyes meet mine. I smile and she starts moving in my direction. “Hello,” I say. “Are you having a nice afternoon?”

“Do you like my bear?” she asks.

“He’s lovely,” I reply.

“50p or he goes to landfill,” she answers. She holds her hand open, waiting for the ransom to be paid.

The bear stares forlornly at me. What choice have I got? I open my purse and get out a coin.

“That will do.” She takes the money and thrusts the bear at me. “Be happy,” she says as she heads back to the bric-a-brac table, sweeps up a rag doll and heads off towards to a smartly dressed man having a cup of tea in the corner of the room.

Part Two

Which is how and why, this year, Aneirin the Teddy Bear, has come to be the star of my Advent Calendar on Twitter (@marialalic). Two days after his (its?) arrival, we headed onto the Glamorgan Ridgeway for an Unlost Places expedition, about which I will write more in January when sanity has returned. Unused to having company on my walks, I started off by introducing him to trig spotting

and from there we walked across the mountain tracks and sheep trails

before we reached Mynydd Portref Wind Farm.

We ended our trek with Cranberry & Orange Scones at the lovely Black Mill Cafe in (not surprisingly) Blackmill Village. Cranberry and Orange is is not a flavour combination that would have occurred to me but it was very successful, particularly coming with a choice of either Cinnamon Butter (very nice) or Orange Curd & Clotted Cream (sublime). If ever there was a reason to support #indie cafes and coffee shops, then being able to sit opposite a small teddy bear and share your afternoon tea without anyone looking askance at you, is it.

Part Three

I had to be in Powys on the 5th December so there was a good opportunity to get at least three photographs of Aneirin done for the Advent Calendar. One of my favourite places in the world is the lovely Tretower Court and Castle. The man on reception didn’t find it at all remarkable that a small bear would be touring the premises. Put him, he said, on the throne in the Banqueting Hall. I did but Aneirin – being little – was overwhelmed by the immense table and the majestic wall tapestry. My advisor was undeterred. Try, he suggested, getting the castle in the background. This proved to be much more in Aneirin’s style.

The problem was that although I like the castle ruins, it’s the atmospheric Tretower Court that I love. I wandered in and out of the rooms and galleries before finally finding a place where Aneirin could channel his inner Errol Flynn.

Part Four

Sunday, 8th December was the day that Storm Atiyah made landfall and the day that I was stuck on Newton Beach for more than two hours, marshalling The Christmas Pudding Race that is organised by a local running club. 70mph gusts of wind sandblasted everything, everyone and every teddy in their way.

With Aneirin safely anchored to a piece of driftwood, I made a piece of Unlost Places art using found objects from the strand line. It started off as a sort of windchime but soon ended up wrapping itself around the supporting piece of wood.

With the last runners safely off the beach, we (I mean all the volunteers and not just me and Aneirin – I have not slipped that far off the plane of reality) made our way back to the finishing area. I know that virtue is its own reward but marshalling brings lots of practical benefits too. Banana themed meals for the next week, for example.

Part Five

I’ve decided that having a teddy bear companion has been quite a pleasant diversion to the awfulness which saturates the News these days. And not just for me, either. One of the sanest people I know is going to knit Aneirin a jumper and she didn’t even take a lot of persuading!

Aneirin’s Twitter activities are unlikely to last into next year unless I decide the world (or me) is in need of a bit less sanity and a bit more distraction. As a thought provoking Christmas present to you as you’re still reading, I’ll leave you with this quotation from Douglas Adams:

“If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”

Cyfarchion y Tymor.

In Rainy Autumn

“And I rose in rainy autumn and walked abroad in a shower of all my days.” Dylan Thomas

Fed up of this rainy autumn? Then let me take you back to a hot summer day instead,. It’s Friday the 28th of June. Even the usually muddy waters of the Towy estuary are glistening under a blue sky; no whisper of breeze disturbs the green-leafed trees that edge the railway track between Kidwelly and Carmarthen. As the train passes through Ferryside (Glan-y-fferi) station I glance out of the dust smudged window at the silhouette of Llansteffan Castle, perched on a hill above the opposite shore. I make this journey quite often and that glance towards Llansteffan Castle means it’s time to stop working, put my books in my bag, collect my belongings and get ready to leave the train.

I stand up, hear my phone hit the floor (because it was on my lap not in my pocket) and spend valuable moments in an undignified scramble between my seat and the one in front. By the time I retrieve my phone, Carmarthen station – which was ten minutes away – is now much closer and I have a flurry of anxiety at the possibility of missing the opportunity to get off the train, instead being swept towards Milford Haven, Pembroke Dock or Fishguard. (I should say that I have visited – intentionally – all of these towns and would be happy to do so again. It’s just that if I’m aiming for Carmarthen, that’s where I want to go.) Today I am taking advantage of the town’s integrated transport hub to get me to my destination. Or I would if I could be bothered to wait for the bus at the railway station. I can’t, so walk across the wonderful Pont King Morgan Footbridge to catch the 227 bus to Llansteffan village.

As well as its castle and the titular church, this place was home to the late artist Osi Rhys Osmond and it’s where Dylan Thomas spent much of his childhood, later inviting the world to share its magical innocence through his poem ‘Fern Hill’. These are the sort of things I should know about before travelling somewhere to make an art map but one of the flaws in my exploration technique is that I tend to visit a place first and do the research afterwards. Then, of course, I need to go back so that not only do I have context for my wanderings but I will have also worked out where the best coffee and cake is to be had en route.

Anyway, back to the plot. The number 227 bus takes about 20 minutes to reach Llansteffan and then carries on to Llanybri. When you’ve never been to a place before, the best plan for choosing where to get off a bus is to wait for some local to ding the bell and shuffle to their feet. This tried and test method means that I soon find myself at the corner of Water Lane. The bus trundles off uphill and out of sight. Not surprisingly Water Lane leads down to the the river but before you get to the Towy itself, some town planner has thoughtfully arranged a surfeit of car parking places as well as neatly cut verges and picnic benches. I walk down the road, nosing over low walls into people’s gardens, looking for ideas and comparing the growth of their roses to mine. (Mine are better.)

The river has disappeared behind a nature reserve of marram-grassed sand dunes. Maps giving instructions about where, when and how dogs are allowed to be walked, to defecate or merely to exist confuse me because they (the maps) have been orientated through 270 degrees so you have to lean at an extreme angle to make sense of them. Not having a dog with me, I don’t bother. After a bit there are more car parking spaces; benches alongside the pavement give a view across the estuary expanse that is as impressive as it is unexpected. Who’d have thought there would be an immense, golden and tropical looking beach? Hardly anybody by the look of it.

There’s a footpath to the castle signposted from the corner of the car park. After a few hundred metres it forks: right is The Old Road (sic) which leads into the village with its artisan bakery, pubs and church; left the path goes steeply uphill to the castle. When you climb to the top and survey, breathless, the panorama across the bay, it’s easy to understand why – before the Normans got here – there had been an Iron Age Hill Fort and a 6th Century Promontory Fort. Right up until it ended up in the hands of the Tudor dynasty, Llansteffan Castle was a target for and site of conflict between the English and the Welsh princes.

I don’t stay at the castle long because there’s no shade inside the walls from the sun which now high in the sky. I go back down the path and follow The Old Road to the village. An elderly man is strimming undergrowth in the walled graveyard – the Llan – that surrounds the church of St Ystyffan. It’s a grade II listed building of white washed rubble stone, the oldest parts of which are dated to 13th Century although it’s likely that it was a site of Christian worship from the 6th. St Ystyffan was a contemporary of St Teilo and there are other churches in Wales dedicated to him, particularly in Powys. It’s lovely and cool inside the church so I take my time admiring the medieval stonework and the beautiful stained glass windows. Outside the strimmer putters to a halt and doesn’t restart. Either man or machine thinks hard work and the midday day sun don’t go together. From the church I walk back up The Old Road, this time veering off before the castle slope and going through an iron gate.

A woodland path leads to St Anthony’s Well, now little more than an arched hollow with an empty niche but once known as a healing well with pins and pennies left as offerings. A series of stone steps takes me onto the scorching sands of the beach. The cool, shimmering waters beckon me and I can think of nothing better at this moment than a paddle in the shallows. Until, that is, I find that between me and the Towy are the remains of many, many dead jellyfish.

I retreat to the beach cafe for an ice cream and wait on a bench for the arrival of the boat which will take me back to Ferryside. When I make maps, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to convey the poetic and metaphysical features of landscape through stitch. Now I’m going to have to find a way to express jellyfish mortality too. In the meantime though, this is the stitched sketch I made of the walk in the countryside around Llansteffan:

The best bit of the whole day, however, was the view of Llansteffan from the Carmarthen Bay Ferry.

Art in a Native Land

“Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land.” Sir Walter Scott

Before we left Scotland I was determined to see the famous stone circles of Kilmartin. For some perverse reason our sat nav decided to ignore the obvious route of the A816 and instead took us on a panic attack-inducing, twisting, narrow lane towards the village of Kilmore – aptly named, we thought, especially after we encountered a full size bus hurtling towards us, the driver of which had more faith in his braking ability than our nerves could cope with. Eventually we got back to the main road and as Kilmartin Glen opened up, we stopped at Carnasserie Castle.

Kilmartin Glen From the bottom of the hill, it looks like one of the ubiquitous stone towers that scatter the Scottish landscape but as you climb the slope, it becomes clear that whoever built this was sending a very serious message about power, ownership and the consequences of threatening either. The tower is five storeys high and can be climbed. If listening to the sat nav had been our first mistake of the day then deciding to take the spiral, unlit, un-handrailed, slippery-with-age stone staircase to the top of Carnasserie Castle – while carrying an acrophobic Jack Russell terrier – was our second. The views across the vast expanse of the glen were magnificent and certainly gave an indication as to why this landscape attracted the attention of stone circle builders. Once we’d recovered from the climb, however, there was the terrible realisation that what had come up, had to go down.

stones at carnasserie castle There are few better ways to calm jangling nerves than doing a bit of watercolour painting. Once on terra firma I tried to capture the colour of the castle stones which from the bottom of the hill look a dour grey but up close are the most delicate pink – quite lovely if you are in a post-traumatic state.

Stone circle

Kilmartin was everything I had hoped to see in terms of landscape archaeology. There are standing stones, stone circles and burial chambers everywhere. Probably the biggest disappointment was that we arrived shortly after a coach load of American tourists, many of whom were of the opinion that the best way to appreciate the work of neolithic man was to lie on their backs with their legs stretched up on the sides of the monoliths. Whilst I don’t have a problem if this is done out of spiritual necessity, it did mean that photo opportunities were limited.

Rear view of Rosslyn Chapel

More history lay in wait at our next destination as we briefly visited Rosslyn Chapel, rightly feted because of its stupendous carving but disappointingly famous because of its involvement with the plot and film of The Da Vinci Code. We made the mistake of being there on a weekend in the school holidays. If you’ve never been, Roslin (the village) is about 10 miles south of Edinburgh and you should make it your life’s ambition to get there. Definitely a place for the bucket list but don’t stop at just seeing the chapel – there’s a lovely castle and some terrific walks through historical battlefields around the village too.

silhouette of bamburgh castle

Next day we drove to Bamburgh where the massive castle overlooks the wide, golden-sanded beach and from there we headed to Gilsland, once the outer limit of the Roman Empire. It was here that I intended to make my next piece of Unlost Places art. The idea came in two parts: the first is captured in the photograph at the very top of the blog. Nailed to the fence to the left of the tree was a dead crow. Doing this is an old farming way of warning other crows to stay away from the field.

Chained stone The second part of the idea came when I saw this stone. Here in Wales we chain standing stones too. It is said that doing so stops the stone from wandering off and taking the path with it.

water colour of stone

This was the first time that I had done performance art as part of Unlost Places and my recitation of a poetic tercet whilst standing in the middle of a Northumbrian lane probably frightened off more crows that the old farming way. Being so close to Hadrian’s Wall meant I was spoilt for choice when it came to making a larger piece of artwork. Until, that is, we passed the Temple of Mithras at Carrawburgh.

knitting

Creative Knitting is always a bit fiddly and you can never be sure it’s going to work out until the very last bead is attached or French Knot stitched. And to those who think that maps are drawn with lines on paper all I can say is that for me, on a damp Tuesday afternoon in May, standing in the Temple of Mithras in the bleak landscape of Carrawburgh, this is how I understood my native land.

wall hanging

A Walk Through Dalriada

“Sow an act, and you reap a habit. Sow a habit, and you reap a character. Sow a character and you reap a destiny.” Charles Reade

Oban

The historical kingdom of Dalriada was first settled by Irish raiders and eventually came to include much of what is now known as Argyll. You can’t walk far in the area around Oban without coming across reminders of a past which sowed the seeds of Scotland and Scottish character. This 11 mile walk from Oban to Sutherland’s Grove Forest (near Barcaldine) followed part of the Caledonian Way cycle route, most of which is traffic free or on quiet lanes. If, like me, you start by going down the old carriage road towards Dunollie Castle, you’ll pass Fingal’s Stone. Legend has it that that Bran used to tie his faithful hunting dog, Fingal, to this piece of volcanic rock. It was just starting to rain when I got there so rather than get the paints out, I came up with a tercet.

Fingals stone Dunollie

“From the west he will call through

time. Scenting the air, Fingal

waits – still, listening, ready.”

Beach

The weather was improving as I left Dunollie Castle and turned north. By the time I reached Ganavan Sands with it’s wide sandy beach, the clouds were lifting with the sky promising a weak sunshine for the rest of the day . I’d wanted to visit Ganavan Sands because it hosts a parkrun . I wasn’t going to be in the area at 9.30am on a Saturday to do the whole 5K so I followed part of the route across the dunes and heath towards Dunbeg.

Dunbeg sketch

I’ll confess that cycling doesn’t hold much in the way of attraction for me but if I’d had a bike on this stretch of the Caledonian Way, I’d probably have ended up walking anyway – there were some seriously steep slopes! Having made the summit, the track wound downhill through a magical woodland. The hillsides were covered in ancient oaks that clustered and curled together, gossiping secrets as the light breeze filtered through their drapes of lichen. Occasionally a hidden crow splintered the silence with a loud C-a-a-a-r-k! Field sketching and walking always combine to make wobbly paintings but I think it’s a great way to capture a mystical atmosphere of place.

Dunstaffnage

I diverted from the path at Dunstaffnage, home to many of the ancient kings of Scotland and where in the past the iconic Stone of Destiny was kept. This was the place which was once the centre of Dalriada and for many people, it is where the ideal of a nation called Scotland was born.

Dunstaffnage bluebells

Wandering through the bee-humming woods and past the ruins of a stone built chapel, was like walking through a lake of bluebells.

Pebble painting

I came to a pebbly cove which is now home to a piece of Unlost Places art. I drew the image with a waterproof feltpen so the sea shouldn’t damage it too much – for a while, at least. I don’t suppose my pebble will ever be found on a beach where they are not only in infinite supply but constantly moving in and out with the tide but I like to think that it was my gift to Dalriada.

Caledonia Way

The Caledonian Way goes past some magnificent lochside scenery and walking is a wonderful way to appreciate the landscape. I took this photograph when the Caledonian Way had curved behind some trees and away from the road. I could hear cars hurtling along, their drivers having no idea of what they were missing. From Benderloch I walked on quiet lanes towards Barcaldine where I encountered the first of the day’s midgies.

Orienteering course

Not even midgies could stop my heart from lifting when I realised that Sutherland’s Grove Forestry was home to an orienteering course. My joy was complete when I found a map that someone had left on a bench rather than taking it home or putting it in a rubbish bin. Following the orienteering course took me through some of the most picturesque parts of the woodland but even if it hadn’t, I loved chasing through the trees looking for controls and when I couldn’t find them, remembering that I’d always had a tendency to overshoot my intended location by misjudging my stride length. Some habits die hard!

Wood carving In some of the glades, there were creatures sculpted in dead wood that could have inspired (or been inspired by) The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. A troll – presumably caught out by the May sunshine – was lurking close to a bridge over a narrow gorge.

Sutherlands Grove

Higher up the slopes the scenery was even more dramatic. It’s an area associated with the Celtic legend of Deirdre who escaped from Ulster to this part of Dalriada with her lover, Naoise of the Red Branch. This photograph is looking towards Beinn Lora which translates to Deirdre’s Hill.

woven tree hanging

In Wales, we call the gathering of wool tufts from hedges and fences gwlana. I used gwlana and pickings of forest litter to create this piece of weaving which I left hanging from a tree in Sutherland’s Grove.

Dalriada

Unlost Places is a project about mapping the metaphysical features of landscape, using art to express what it feels like to be a certain place. Just before I started this walk through Dalriada I’d stopped off in a shop in Oban and bought a pack of textured threads. Since then, I’ve worked with my poetic tercets, field sketches and stitched samples to create this map of my walk using Free Form Knitting, Crochet and Weaving.

Unlost Places – Moffat to Mull

“There is a silent eloquence in every wild bluebell that fills my softened heart with bliss that words could never tell.” Anne Brontë

Our journey from Wales to Scotland tracked the flowering of bluebells; they had the appearance of waterfalls on the harsh hillsides of Snowdonia, nestled in the meadows of Lancashire and were cushioned in the leaf litter of Scottish woods. As we travelled north their hue changed from an almost ephemeral delicacy to the most intense hyacinth blue. Whilst the sight of them is arresting enough, they also drown the air with a heady perfume – reason enough for anyone to want to walk amongst them. Scotland in May is a pretty good where and when to do so.

MOFFAT

In front of moss-fringed stones ramsons,violets,campions dance; Jack waits his turn by the hedge.

I love walking and now that I’ve given up painting in favour of field sketching and poetic tercets, I find more and more textures that I want to try and capture. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.

The area around Moffat is ideal for the Unlost Places project: twisting lanes enfolded by steep sided hills and the sense that everywhere is a landscape that belongs to a moment in history. I marked my passage through place and time by building a small sculpture on the walls of an ancient bridge.

I use what are euphemistically called ‘indigenous dyes’ to colour material for stitchery. This is done by rubbing fabric against wood, metal or stone surfaces to stain the background surface. It’s an example of how an art map becomes much more the visual representation of a place that I spoke about in last month’s blog.

THE ISLE OF MULL

A visit to the Isle of Mull (http://www.isle-of-mull.net/) had long been on my to-do list. We crossed from Oban to Craignure then headed to the beautiful and isolated bay of Lochbuie. Apart from a couple of houses, an honesty shop (a well-stocked general store where you chose what goods you wanted and were trusted to leave the appropriate amount of money behind – how refreshing is that as a concept?) and the ubiquitous ruined castle, Lochbuie is also home to the tiny St Kilda’s church.

Unlost Places is all about using art and poetry to reflect features which are in some way transcendent. In the porch of St Kilda’s is an engraved Celtic Cross, tentatively dated to the 8th Century. This is a project that finds creativity in unexpected places.

It’s also a project that leaves creativity in unexpected places. An hour spent beach-combing yielded driftwood, shells and old fishing line – enough raw materials for some weaving to be left hanging from a tree. Hopefully proving that it’s not just bluebells which are silently eloquent.

Prosiect Digoll/Unlost Places

Showing Llanddwyn Beach

The idea behind Prosiect Digoll/Unlost Places has been milling around in my head since I first realised that I could combine poetic tercets with creative stitchery to map metaphysical features of landscape. I’ve noticed that when I say this sort of thing to people (family, friends, complete strangers – I’m not fussy), their faces go blank, their eyes glaze over and they wander away, making lame excuses about having something else to do. If you’re still reading at this point, I assume you are mildly interested in Prosiect Digoll/Unlost Places or some aspect of creativity so I’ll start by explaining some of the terms I’ve used in the first sentence.

Poetic Tercets: When I was about 7 years old, my elder sister ( Mrs B ) and I used to watch The Man from Uncle. In one episode, the character Ilya Kuryakin (played by David McCallum) had cause to recite a haiku. As everything that Ilya did influenced my sister’s thirst for knowledge, she – and therefore, I – became familiar with this form of Japanese poetry. For my MA dissertation (Lingering Fragments appears in the Gallery section) I used the Welsh version of a haiku which is called englynion y milwyr . It has three lines, each made up of seven syllables. I find that the rhythm of walking naturally leads to odd phrases popping into my head which I scribble onto paper and polish into poetic form later.
Creative Stitchery: The number of people (usually men) I’ve met over the years who’ve told me how their mother/grandmother/auntie was so good at embroidery that you couldn’t tell the front of the work from the back is legion. This is not what you get with creative stitchery.
Map: Forget about art maps being anything like the Ordnance Survey variety. I read somewhere that a map is simply a visual representation of place but people like Richard Long (http://www.richardlong.org/ ) use sounds or words to lead people through a landscape.
Metaphysical features of landscape: My intention is to make art which expresses what it is like to be in a particular place rather than to interpret how it looks.

The photographs/video I’ve used up until this point have been of Anglesey (Ynys Môn) which will give a sense of what it looked like. What it was like to be there needed a more creative response. On Llanddwyn Beach the sands yielded plenty of raw material to make some beach art which could be left in the place which inspired its making.

Listening to waves rattling over pebbles and rustling seaweed on the strand line made a phrase pop into my head:

“she was prey to restless waves”

and bearing in mind that I was in the homeland of Branwen, there was an inevitable effect on the tercet:

Given, taken, biding time,

she was prey to restless waves;

Hope was borne on slender wings.

I collected pebbles which formed the basis of this piece of creative stitchery.

Creative Stitchery

Finally came the mapping of metaphysical features of landscape. If you ever visit Llanddwyn Bay on Anglesey (and if you get the chance, you should), this may not help you get from A to B but it’s what the place did to my stitching fingers.

Art map

I’ll leave the last words to someone who spent his childhood on Anglesey and may have walked on the same beach. I think he’d probably understand what I hope to achieve through Prosiect Digoll/Unlost Places.

“You have to imagine a waiting that is not impatient because it is timeless.” R.S.Thomas

The Unlost Voices

Collection of art materials

This is the shortest blog I’ve ever written and it’s because I’m about to begin work on my latest project which is called Digoll/The Unlost .

There’s a place in Wales called Cefn Digoll. This translates as “The Ridge of the Unlost” and it’s what gave me the idea of making maps about what the voices of metaphysical features of landscape are trying to say. I love the idea that being unlost comes from becoming aware of place rather than by finding a direction of travel.

Field sketch of Skye

For the next few weeks I’ll be travelling up and down the country making small art maps of places that I visit. Some of these I’ll be leaving in situ, others I’ll be bringing back to form part of my next exhibition. If you want to keep up with what I’m doing and where I’ve been, you can follow me on twitter – @marialalic or you can wait until next month’s blog (which will be longer than this one!) when I’ll post photographs of where I’ve been and what art I’ve made. Until then, hwyl am y tro!

Crafting a Business

Image of lake at Parc Calon Lan

Did you know that most people have an attention deficit after about 6 seconds? This basically means that when you are trying to attract someone’s attention on social media, through an advertisement or by email, if they haven’t been hooked within those 6 seconds, you might as well give up because mentally they will have wandered off and be chasing butterflies through a cornfield. You may think that 6 seconds is a bit speedy but anyone wanting to try and get my attention has to contend with the fact that – thanks to a surfeit of university education – I have learnt to speed read. Also as I spent the last 10 years of my NHS career scanning written medical notes looking for tiny snippets of crucial information it means that the usual 6 seconds is about 5 seconds longer than I waste on anything. Which is why I almost missed the thing that made this week very interesting. Last Saturday I wandered down to the Bridgend Craft Collective Fair (http://craftbridgend.org.uk/) which is held monthly in Bryngarw Country Park.

Hand made teddies — Hand crafted is best

Sue of The Sand, the Sea and Me reminded me about a seminar which was taking place in Margam Park. Being organised and hosted by the lovely people at Agora (https://www.menterabusnes.co.uk/en) was a seminar/workshop confidently titled “How to Make Money from your Craft Business.” I recalled seeing the details pop up on one of my social media feeds but whilst it may have snagged the people with a 6 second attention span, it had not survived my very cursory glance. Thanks to Sue I went back and took a longer look and I was glad I did because the event proved to be one that was full of useful information not just for crafters or micro enterprises, but for anyone who sees the virtue in building resilience and self-reliance into small, local communities. Apparently I’m one of a minority of people who find radical economics exciting but the speakers at the seminar ensured there was something to interest – even inspire – everyone who turned up.

The day started off with a presentation by Jill Davies of Made It Markets who gave lots of useful advice particularly when it comes to pricing hand-crafted or hand-grown products. From working out who your target market is and getting to know your customer profile to identifying your USP(unique selling point), Jill’s information came from a long experience in a range of design activities. I particularly enjoyed her discussion around the conundrum that so many makers face – the difference between pricing from the head and pricing from the heart. According to Jill it is only by believing that what is made has value will the maker feel entitled to charge the price they deserve. She concluded her presentation with a useful list of jobs to be done as homework – a task that betrayed Jill’s previous career as a teacher. These included:

Identify your product market
Work on your USP
Develop a focussed product range
Identify your ideal customer and where you will find them
Try out different costing and pricing formulae
Consider your branding and display

ruin at Margam Park

Before becoming an MA student at the Royal College of Art, Emily O’Reilly (https://emilyoreillytextiles.wordpress.com ) was involved in a project called “Gwlan to Oo” which looked at the way in which the wool industry of the Shetland Islands had become a successful enterprise not just because of the quality of its products but also as a result of developing an innovative approach to forging links and connections with other disciplines. For me, one of the most interesting ideas she explained was the potential for economies to become circular and self-sustaining. This was embedded in every aspect of the Shetland Islands Wool Project from using locally sourced materials and selling goods with an authentic provenance to making sure that there was, in effect, no end of life for the items made.

Tulip Garden

Welsh Lavender (https://www.welshlavender.com )is a successful business which began in the kitchen of a hillside farm and now employs around 20 people. It came about because of a chance remark when Nancy and Bill invited some neighbours over for a glass of wine. That led to a successful grant application and the planting of one field of Lavender followed by the realisation that something would need to be done with the harvest. Nancy’s entertaining presentation (including getting everyone in the audience to sample her product) made some useful points for any entrepreneur:

Grant funding is a great motivator
If your branding doesn’t work, change it
Much success will come from face to face contact
Believe in your product
Local provenance will sell
Be prepared to move away from people and businesses that don’t fit your ethos

Welsh Hillside

The last speaker of the day was Claire Carew of Visit Wales and she wanted the audience to understand that local craft and produce businesses were part of the overall attraction for visitors to Wales, helping to make places become destinations rather than points on a route. She had this advice to offer:

Be authentic
Understand what influences your customers
Use all of your local expertise
Make the most of your tourism community
Create relevant content in your website and social media posts
Look beyond your crafts and produce
Do your research and connect with other people
Tag your images

You’d think that would be enough but after a very nice lunch and a lot of networking, everyone had the opportunity to take part in a one to one ‘meet the buyer’ encounter. I was lucky enough to have 10 minutes with Nia Evans of Bodlon and explain to her the thoughts behind my next project Y Llwybrau Digoll (The Unlost Paths). I’ll give a taster of what this is about in my usual blog next month but until then here’s a little hint of what’s to come.

The art of brief writing

Sunset over Bristol Channel — Ogmore by Sea Sunset

I’ve always found writing really easy, which is just as well because I’ve been doing a lot of it just recently. I’ve been taking notes at seminars, mentoring a creative writing student on her memoirs, doing critical reading for someone writing a crime novel, working on the drafts of my own book and then got invited to take part in the Interior Monologues exhibition at Oriel y Bont , University of South Wales. I mentioned this venture in last month’s blog but since then I’ve been to the opening night and, along with the other writers, I had the opportunity to read my work to an audience. It was an interesting project to be involved in not just from the creative point of view but also because there was a strict limitation on the amount of writing which could be submitted – just one A4 sheet of paper. This got me thinking about the techniques writers can use when their work is brief in length or as a brief, in content. Here are some of my suggestions:

Choose your words carefully

At Secondary school I had an English teacher called Mrs Evans. This is next bit is not me being deliberately insulting but I need you to get the picture of her – she was fat, grubby, had unruly white hair, nicotine stained fingers and she wore shapeless dresses bound around the middle with mismatched belts. The worst thing about her was that she sucked toffees as she was marking homework so exercise books were often returned with dribbles of syrup sticking the pages together. The best thing about her was that she was a brilliant teacher. One day she set us the challenge of writing in praise of someone who we liked but without using the word ‘nice’ anywhere in the composition. It was a word, she said, which had been so over-used that its contribution to expression was redundant and that if the world wasn’t careful, nice as both a word and a concept would become meaningless. Hmmm – watching the febrile shenanigans of politicians in this country at the moment, she could be right.

Understand and respect the context

Based on Gone with the wind — Rose drew this in 1946

Yesterday I was sorting some stuff out and came across my late mother’s sketchbook. The drawings inside were made in 1946, when she was 20 years old. They are colourful, simplistic and not very good technically speaking. More interesting to me is that they are naive to the point of being immature, almost as if they had been drawn by a child. I think there’s something about them that speaks loudly about the way in which a creative outlet can shape the way in which we deal with unpleasant experiences. As a girl of 14, Rose was sent into service to an aristocratic family in England; at 17 she returned to Port Talbot to nurse her ailing father and for the last two years of the Second World War, she worked as an usherette at the local cinema, running the two miles home every night in blackout with German bombers flying overhead seeking out the docks and industries of nearby Swansea. As my teenage years were spent in a slump of sullen laziness punctuated by the occasional tantrum, I am in awe of young people who suspend their childhood to deal with a ravaged reality and can still draw pretty pictures.

Transport the reader to another place

I fell out of love with running last December and just recently I’ve been trying to rekindle my enthusiasm. How better and where better to do this than by returning to one of my favourite places in South Wales, the gorgeous Afan Forest Park. In my twenties I applied to become a voluntary ranger here but changed my mind when the other interviewee turned up wearing army fatigues, a bullet proof vest and with handcuffs dangling from his belt. In my thirties I orienteered in and out of the woodland glades, sun rays dappling the pine strewn tracks. In my forties I remember one fabulous experience of running on the trail from Abercregan to Pontrhydyfen in heavy snow that blanketed all of the familiarity out of the world. Sadly there’s been precious little of the white stuff around here this winter. On the February day I pulled on my trainers and set out to follow the track up towards Cymer before coming back on the other side of the valley, the weather was gloriously spring like. My plan worked and as I listened to my footsteps on the coarse gravel track and the plaintive mewing of Red Kites overhead, I slipped back into a cosy affection with running. The relentless rhythm of moving forward under your own steam strengthens your senses and heightens your power of observation. How else on a 5 metre wide stony track could I have spotted this tiny frog in enough time to avoid squelching him underfoot?

Find a phrase

Exhibition work at USW — Interior Monologues

I was very lucky to work with the artist Mererid Velios for the Interior Monologues exhibition. Lucky not just because she’s a talented individual but also because she let me see the notes which underpinned her thought process – what she called ‘a brain dump’. Her starting place was to consider the decor of an abandoned 1940s interior, musing on the people who had once lived there and wondering about why they had left. From there she thought about they way in which we are all the product of the generations who came before us and after that she began to consider the effects of the way in which poverty was once faced with heroism but is now labelled as almost a failure. Her artwork was constructed out of forms used to apply for Universal Credit and used figures based on Sisyphus to make her point. I had one A4 sheet of paper to convey all of that. For me everything centred around one phrase (Here is my hand) which I repeated to connect the different aspects of her idea. You can read what I wrote here .

Be gentle and know when your work is done

Never Ending or Beginning

“Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning, on an ever spinning reel,” Alan and Marilyn Bergman

I don’t usually plan ahead what I’m going to write in my blogs – you’ve probably guessed that if you read them regularly – but when Michel Legrand died recently, I started thinking about one of his most famous compositions, “Windmills of your mind” and was wondering how I could fit in a reference to it. I’ve loved this song since I first heard it, mostly because it was sung by Noel Harrison. (I had a crush on him when he starred in The Girl from Uncle with Stephanie Powers. In my defence, I was 8 and not very discriminating about the sort of television programmes I watched.) Anyway poor M. Legrand’s demise got me humming the tune and thinking about beginnings and how difficult it is to spot the point at which you stop being a student of something and start putting what you’ve learnt into practice.

I know from my own experience learning to speak Welsh, going from dweud eich dweud in the classroom to sgwrsio yn y byd go iawn is as terrifying as going from pedalling a tricycle with stabilisers on to riding a racing bike with razor blade thin wheels down a steep hill. You can read more about how I got on with the Welsh language here incidentally. If you are dysgu Cymraeg fel oedolion it might make you realise that having a sense of humour is as necessary as a command of grammar.

Trying to work out the point when I got to grips with creativity is less easy. When it comes to Textile Art, I disagree with John Galsworthy when he said “beginnings are always messy.” This is my attempt at portraying the brooding atmosphere of Kenfig Pool in the year 2000. Local legend has it that a wizard cursed the inhabitants of the prosperous borough of Kenfig for not offering him shelter. A fierce storm arose and as the sea broke through the defences and flooded the village, drowning it for ever, a ghostly cry of Dial a ddaw! (Vengeance is coming!) was heard on the wind. If ever a piece of my work failed to capture a sense of place, this is it.

This is a picture of Kenfig Pool worked in Needlepoint — Kenfig Pool Needlepoint 2000

Shortly after I began a course in Creative Textiles with the Open College of Arts and had to come to terms with using a sketchbook to record the way in which pieces of work were developing. I have never enjoyed working this way. I see a piece of white paper and am convinced that any mark I make on it will spoil it forever. In spite of repeated attempts to convince my tutors that I was useless at drawing and worse at painting, they refused to give me dispensation for that part of the course. Grumbling and resentful, I set about a project on responding to place. I chose the entrance to an old mine close to where I live as the subject partly because it was easy to get to but also because I’d read something about it being haunted.

This is a drawing of an entrance to an old mine — Old Mine Entrance Watercolour Pencil

This is a picture of an old mine entrance worked in pastels — Old Mine Entrance Pastels

This is a stitched sketch of an old mine entrance — Old Mine Entrance Stitched Sketch

Bit by bit I came to realise that learning to be creative was much the same as studying Welsh. I didn’t need to be good at drawing or skilled at painting – these were simply the nouns and verbs of a visual language; my sketchbook was not a collection of images which were nice to look at – it was a record that only I needed to understand.

Just recently (January 2019) I attended a course at Kenfig Nature Reserve and had half an hour to spare before it started. I decided to walk across the sand dunes and pay a visit to Kenfig Pool. Having a mobile phone means that these days, there’s always a camera to hand so I started off taking a couple of photographs.

This is a picture of Kenfig Pool — Kenfig Pool January 2019

This is a picture of Kenfig Pool looking towards the steelworks at Margam — Kenfig Pool January 2019

I’ve gone from thinking of sketchbooks as a necessary evil to a useful bit of kit. My change of opinion is down to finally finding a technique which works for me; I use a felt pen to draw on a still wet watercolour wash and because I’ve come to terms with the fact that the sketchbook is a resource for me and me alone, I don’t worry about whether it is good by anyone else’s standards.

This is a watercolour sketch — Kenfig Pool Field Sketch January 2019

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks doing a small art map of Kenfig Pool. It’s still a work in progress but you’ll be able to see how it’s going to turn out. It makes an interesting comparison to that needlepoint work I did nearly 20 years ago.

This is picture of a stitched map — Kenfig Pool Stitched Map Work in Progress January 2019

In amongst all of these Kenfig Pool shenanigans, I was invited to contribute work to an exhibition called ‘Interior Monologues’ which is opening on the 11th February 2019 at Oriel y Bont . I’ve produced a piece of poetic prose as a response to the work of artist Mererid Velios . It’s been a new and exciting method of collaboration for me and I’ve really enjoyed it. Interestingly enough, I probably would never have got involved except for the fact that Barrie and Maria, my Creative Writing lecturers from 2004 and 2005, remembered that I always wanted to write about visual art. Are there such things as beginnings and endings? I don’t think so.

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” Scott Adams

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