Imagined histories shape our sense of who we are, where we come from, and of what we might become. In Wales such narratives – the Mabinogi, legends of Owain Glyndŵr, the Druidic inventions of Iolo Morganwg, tales of the Rebecca Riots, TV adaptations of How Green Was My Valley - have a particular resonance in a country with two languages which exists in a complex union with its larger neighbour. The histories we learn in school or read in textbooks are often partial, fragmented, even distorted. They have been written, on the whole, by those who have the power and education to wield the pen: the victor, the coloniser, the slave-owner. They offer us one story. Imagined histories help us to fill in the gaps, to try on other costumes, to walk in someone else’s skin and see through their eyes. Art – whether visual, written or aural – can use imagination to bridge the gap between past and present, the remembered and the forgotten. The artworks in this exhibition, and the creative responses to them by poets and prose writers, offer a rich source of new possibilities for the re-imagining of our national histories.
The ‘Imagining History’ exhibition accompanies a Conference of the same name which runs Friday 12 – Saturday 13 November 2021.
The exhibition includes work by Susan Adams, Iwan Bala, Judith Beecher, Elizabeth Bridge, Jack Crabtree, Morag Colquhoun, Ivor Davies, Ken Elias, Geraint Evans, Tom Goddard, Clive Hicks Jenkins, Rachel Jones, Naomi Leake, Radha Patel, Kate Milsom, Paul Reas, Andre Stitt, Daniel Trevidy, Dawn Woolley and others.
The exhibition and conference are made possible through the support of University of South Wales, Association of Welsh Writing in English, LLafur, Archif Menywod Cymru/Women’s Archive Wales, and Pontypridd Museum.
Elizabeth Bridge, Spirit of Wales, (n. d.) oil on canvas, USW Artworks Museum Collection
The subject and nostalgic mood of Spirit of Wales by Elizabeth Bridge suggests it was painted between the two World Wars when Welsh nationalism was on the rise. This painting, like numerous others, shows a woman wearing the Welsh national costume as redesigned by Lady Llanover, the wealthy wife of an English ironmaster. Authentic costumes of this type had all but died out in the midnineteenth century. Its revival, therefore, was a propagandist statement intended mainly for the benefit of English tourists and Eisteddfods, though Welsh suffragists also adopted it for their protest marches. Plaid Cymru was founded in 1921 and the repeal of the Welsh Courts Act in 1942 no longer prevented Welsh speakers from speaking their mother tongue. Spirit of Wales can therefore be understood as a female figurehead in whom such Welsh nationalist interests were invested.
Dr Frances Woodley
Daniel Trivedy, Welsh Emergency Blanket 2018. Block print on plastic foil, on loan from the artist
‘Welsh Emergency Blanket’ is an ongoing series of work that responds to the proposal for Wales to become the first Nation of Sanctuary. The work was started in Summer 2018 and is in line with the trajectory of my work that questions the origins and ramifications of our psychological relationship to others. The title Welsh Emergency Blanket is perhaps an ominous one; is there an emergency or likely to be one; what would such a blanket be needed for? The work acts as a platform and brings together what may appear to be two very different conversations; the here and there, the national and the global.
Daniel Trivedy
The concept of Wales as a Nation of Sanctuary stands in contrast to the little-known role of welsh woollen manufacture during our colonial history. A story bought to light by historian Dr Chris Evans from University of South Wales
‘Enslaved people in the eighteenth-century Caribbean may not have heard of Wales but the word ‘Welsh’ may well have been familiar to them. Many of them were clothed in woollens manufactured in Wales – ‘Welsh plains’ or ‘Welsh webs’. The sugar islands were like oil rigs. They were specialised production platforms dedicated to a single high-value commodity. Everything necessary for plantation agriculture to function had to be brought in from outside. The drab workwear issued to captive labourers was made up of cheap linens and coarse woollens. Typically, the woollens were produced in parts of Wales that touched upon Cardigan Bay. Here, impoverished rural households kept body and soul together by spinning and weaving wool. Every year, thousands of yards of woollen fabric, most it worked up in southern Merionethshire or western Montgomeryshire, was shipped across the Atlantic. Rebranded as ‘Negro Cloth’ on colonial markets, this fabric was one of the things that linked Wales to Atlantic slavery.’
Dr Chris Evans
Jack Crabtree, Miner on G6 Face (mid 1970s), oil on canvas, USW Artworks Museum Collection.
In 1974, Jack Crabtree then teaching at Newport School of Art was commissioned by the National Coal Board to spend a year making paintings and drawings of the people and the environment of the South Wales Coal fields. He completed 119 works in all, three of which are housed in the USW Collection.
Etifeddiaeth Tom Llewellyn For Jack Crabtree
Our world is twisted black. It feasts on our form, creeping through the cracks in our skin, burrowing. Our souls are soot. But we keep working keep working keep working keep working until our eyes bleed black and there’s bread on the table.
Rachel Jones, Working Class Attributes, posters (2020), Shown by permission of the artist
Much to my frustration people often do not comply with organizational means of classification, they occupy multiple boxes and often insist on evolving, maturing, migrating and adapting. And yet there are traits; as discernible as a wide nose, red hair or a chin dimple, there are characteristics, by which, you can identify people belonging to a community or sharing a heritage. In as much as these qualities can be exploited and oppressed, they too can be celebrated and honoured.
Rachel Jones
Gelli Lodge Miners’ Banner, from collection of the South Wales Miners’ Library Swansea
The original banner of which this is a replica, dates from 1926 the year of the General Strike. Arthur James Cook was General Secretary of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain from 1924 until his death in 1931. Banners were paraded at the annual miners’ gala as well as on protest marches and held in great esteem. The Gelli Colliery, Ystrad, Rhondda closed in 1937.
An extract from Stay down by Malcolm Lewis, For the South Wales Miners’ Federation
Now he sits silent on his side of the fire grate celebrating with a woodbine, his brother Dai, mining-pale and hollow-cheeked, opposite. Glyn, his clean white vest glowing against his dark skin, his dark brown eyes, normally as resigned as the zoo gorilla’s, laughing. All the boys, they stayed down the Bedwas pit, stopped the coal coming out shut out the scabs. We’re stronger together than you they’ve showed the owners. For the many, not the few.
Paul Reas – Military Wallpaper from I can help series (1980s) From the USW Artworks Museum Collection
Buoyed by her defeat of the miners, victory in the Falklands war of 1982 and the survival of an assassination attempt in 1984, Margaret Thatcher increasingly saw herself as invincible and on the right side of history. Her neoliberal policies, faith in a free-market economy and firm belief in individualism turned British culture from a ‘we’ to a 'me' generation. The deregulation of the banking system meant that credit was easy to come by and consumer spending was rising fast. This growth in consumption was becoming more and more evident in Britain in the mid-1980s. The then new shopping malls, situated on the edges of cities, were the new cathedrals of consumption, and the new 'retail parks,' with their supermarkets and furniture stores, were the parish churches.
Paul Reas
Naomi Leake, Wind Street, digital film 8 minutes 52 seconds, filmed in Swansea in 2008.
The ‘performer’ in the lamb costume is me, the artist. I am quite tall for a woman so people presumed the costume was inhabited by a man. At one point the film wobbles badly. That is the moment the person doing the filming got punched. I kept that in. Performance is all about the now and that wobble in the low-tech film reflects fear. My fear as a performer, the fear of the person filming and the fear of those that chose to be violent towards us.
Articulating a boundary between fact and fiction my work harnesses the symbolic and emotional potential of specific contexts.Naomi Leake
Radha Patel, Finding Aarti (2019) digital film 18 minutes 50 seconds
Radha Patel’s ‘‘Finding Aarti’’ tells the story of a young woman who goes to space to look for her missing sister…after an electrical fault caused her to become trapped inside a space vessel, sending her to live on the Planet Kelvin. In a series of letters – written on three different planets, the film builds on the core themes of Patel’s work - colonialism, nature, religion and the future – through intimate portrayals of life on Earth and other Planets. In these micro-narratives, where life is often complex and lonely, what some (on Earth) may consider the future is already the present lived reality for many (on other Planets) who are exploring solutions to historical systems of oppressions and building better relationships with themselves and those around them.
