1970 : 1971 :1972 : 1973 : 1974 : 1975 : 1976 : 1977 : 1978 : 1979

Welsh Not

The timetable of the whole event and the nature of the performance was nonetheless interrupted by an impromptu happening after Mario Merz had completed his piece for piano, lazer beam, rose and coal sacks. He moved towards Paul Davies who at that moment was holding something like a railway sleeper above his head. On it were burnt the letters 'WN'('Welsh Not') which referred to the punishment for speaking Welsh in school and enforced within living memory. As it happened the chorus of the national anthem was coming through the loud speakers and although Merz does not understand Welsh he gave out phonetic improvisations as he moved around Davies. Paul Davies had already had an argument with a middle-aged man who had emigrated from North Wales to New Zealand and was now accusing the native artist of 'stirring it up'. Though talk of Rota Rua, ice-cold beer, kiwis and All Blacks made peace, the disruption added a new dimension. It showed too that Davies possesses a power of feeling which he expressed both symbolically and in argument and which was most relevant to the Eisteddfod. He felt enough to be a kind of flagellant.
(Ivor Davies, 'The Welsh Arts Councils Performance Pavilion at the National Eisteddfod', in Link 9, Autumn 1977)

1977: Amid the amplified cultural bustle of the National Eisteddfod at Rhosllannerchrugog Paul Davies stands, holding aloft a heavy wooden railway sleeper into which are cut the letters W N (Welsh Not). His unofficial performance intervenes in the controversial programme of international performance art staged by the Welsh Arts Council. The event symbolises the penalisation of Welsh in the past and its continuing loss as a mother language to many Welsh people, including him self. It signals his determination to take art practice into the arena of politics. The wooden hunk is later to be carved into the form of a love spoon.

"... what I did in fact do was attack the bloody Welsh Not with an axe and turn it into a love spoon. The Welsh Not became the Love Spoon, this is another ancient Welsh symbol and in a way it's a progenitor of the Welsh Beca pieces which came out of these sets of Eisteddfodau with my brother in discussions." (Paul Davies in conversation with Ivor Davies, Link Sept/Oct 1986)
(Hourahane, Shelagh. 'A Continuing Presence: A Profile of Paul Davies (1947-93)'. Planet. 130 (1998): 38.)