2. Y Tir - The Land

Simon Whitehead, 2 miles an hour (a pace for walking in rough country with cattle and sheep), en route in Wales, Photo: Pete Bodenham

The mountain range appears, white and gleaming, against the fading light as dusk sets in. A thunderous rumble in the far distance warns of a storm approaching. The glowing red ball of the sun vanishes slowly behind the peaks, bathing them for a moment in its orange beam. We are witness to a glorious sunset in the uplands of the Llyn peninsula in North Wales. Only we are sitting, neatly packed in rows, inside the black-box auditorium of a theatre space. The mountains are formed from crumpled strips of white paper. Moments ago movement artist Simon Whitehead had used them to scribble down memories of a walk across the landscape of the peninsula. Now he is standing next to the paper panorama, moving a red light bulb slowly from one side to the other to illuminate the scenery, whilst his collaborator, sound artist Barnaby Oliver, mixes the sounds of nature with those of technology.

Whitehead's folc-land from 1997, subtitled The long lines project - A landscape re-envisioned, was one of the first of a growing body of work by a new generation of artists working in Wales today who create performances from their physical, sensual and emotional response to the Welsh landscape. Their work is located within a long tradition: in Wales identity has been linked historically, culturally, politically, linguistically, socially, emotionally and aesthetically to its landscape. As a result, in the area of the visual arts, 'landscape painting has been synonymous with Wales for a long time' (Bala 2003, 30), firstly as 'mainly a Romantic ideal, painted for tourists by touring artists like Turner, Sisley, Sutherland, John Piper and Paul Nash, [a form of] colonisation of Welsh landscape through art' (Bala 2003, 29); more lately in works by contemporary painters from Wales such as Peter Prendergast, Iwan Bala and Catrin Webster, who aim to reclaim the pictorial representation of the landscape of their home.

In Welsh performance work, this landscape has been explored with an aesthetic that has its roots in the time-based strategies of land and environmental art and in an ecological concern for rethinking our connection with nature. Whitehead has created a series of 'mapping' performances based on long solitary walks through the Welsh landscape, informed by a sense of estrangement and the desire for a sensual and perceptual reconnection. Whitehead is also a member of the ointment collective (with Stirling Steward, Pete Bodenham and Maura Hazelden), a group of artists based in West Wales, who have staged 'place-sensitive work' in rural sites, inspired by an ecological agenda, local folk traditions and the decline of the traditional farming economy. ointment is currently involved in an exchange with the Boréal Art/Nature centre in Québec. Another artist who has maintained close links with Boréal is performance artist Phil Babot, who undertook a residency at the centre in 2002. Babot creates psychogeographical performance work that too is often based on the practices of walking and mapping, most recently The Long Road to the North, a journey from the southernmost tip of Wales to its northernmost point, following magnetic north and creating occurrences and interventions en route, accompanied by the creation of solo art works alongside collaborations with four other artists who live in varying geographic locations northwards along the designated path.

The first instalment of Babot's year-long project took place in 2002 at Coed Hills Rural Artspace (CHRA), a 180-acre farm in the Vale of Glamorgan in South Wales, which is run by artists who attempt to reconcile the making of contemporary art with ideals of sustainable living. They have transformed the farm into an art space with purpose-built studios, low-impact dwellings for visiting artists, a sculpture trail of site-specific works and a programme of exhibitions, performance festivals and community workshops. The project is sustained by a host of on-site small businesses, including an organic café, wholefood distribution, lime putty production and greenwood handcraft - the Welsh Assembly recently appointed CHRA a model for sustainable development.

Not all artists in Wales who share an interest in working in and from the land, however, are primarily motivated by such ecological or perceptual concerns. There are a number of those whose work has centred instead on social questions of community, on political issues of land use and ownership, or on personal matters of identity. Rawley Clay, founder of CHRA, spent three months in the small village of Beddgelert in the heart of Snowdonia in 2002, working alongside and with the local community, offering them his services as a 'village artist', a new addition to the local economy. Performer Eddie Ladd, who comes from a Welsh-speaking farming background, returns time and again in her work to the location of her upbringing. But Ladd's performances are as much shaped by contemporary media influences as they are by traditional rural culture (recent works referred to the Western Shane, Brian de Palma's Scarface and Fuller's Shock Corridor and stories of rural landslides, the Welsh dairy industry and the theme of terrorism). Ladd shows how ideas of self-containment and stability are inevitably lost and are instead replaced by erosion, fragmentation and cultural self-loathing.

Eddie Ladd, Once Upon a Time in the West - A Solo Performance in a Field (with Four Performers),1996, Photos: Cliff McLucas.

The rural landscape of Wales, however, presents only one part of the country's environment. South Wales in particular is highly industrialized, and the industrial landscape of the so-called 'South Wales valleys', the site of the former coal and steel industries, possesses an iconic status comparable to that of the Welsh mountains of the Romantics. In the works of many artists of the late 19th and early 20th century 'there was a sense of the “picturesque” transferred from unspoiled “heavenly” landscape to “infernal”; from paradise to paradise lost'. (Bala 2003, 30). Today little of this landscape remains - factory buildings have been knocked down and slag heaps greened over. There was a short spell in the 1980s, however, when the abandoned architectural remnants of Wales' industrial past were seized temporarily by site-specific theatre and cross-disciplinary performance work. The most prominent of these were Brith Gof, pioneers of site-specific theatre in Britain, who staged their works in railway stations (Pax, Aberystwyth 1991), disused car factories (Gododdin, Cardiff 1988) and abandoned iron foundries (Haearn, Tredegar 1992). These buildings have since made room for the anonymous sheds of the new call-centre industry. But the psychic landscape of South Wales, with its concomitant symbols of hard physical labour and aggressive masculinity, remains a strong presence. Gay performer and dancer Marc Rees, for example, who worked as a performer with Brith Gof for many years, creates performances and actions that revolve around the negotiation of his sexuality between the intimate childhood landscape of his upbringing in South Wales, a world steeped in conservatism and rugby-machismo, and his current life in the 'queer' realm of the contemporary city.

Literature cited:
Bala, Iwan (2003) Here + Now: Essays on contemporary art in Wales, Bridgend: Seren

[Introduction] [Y Maes/The Field] [Y Tir/The Land] [Y Ddinas / The City] [Y Ty / The House] [Postscript]

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