 An excerpt from a longer piece of writing reflecting on the residency..
The third time we were residents at Mawddach it was just for a week. The third time it was summer and the other houses in the row were heavy with holiday makers and it was hot and every time we went to swim someone thought it looked a good idea and joined us. The third time it got light too early to let it wake me. Still, we woke and we sat in the window and watched the sky and the water shift, and we ate Welsh cakes for breakfast. We visited the old school that will become an art centre, went down into a once hidden basement, marvelled at the colours of layered paint on the walls and felt the buzz of potential, wondered at huge windows and side by side toilets and how a project could be consuming if you didn’t know just how worth it it would be when complete. We swam twice a day and we sat for portrait drawing again and we finally got to grips with a story that had felt incomplete since that first visit, all that time ago. I moved the story from the house to the banks to a forest of seaweed. I rewrote it and I read it out loud and Cat noted down images and we chose six key points. She mocked them up in sketches and I cut the story down into six segments to go on six pages. We formatted the two stories we already have, so that soon we can make them into zines and share them. Cat sketched and mono-printed and I finished a strange selkie novella and my hair was salty the whole time, and then the fog came, just like it had that first November. The water was empty, then, and we went in alone. The hills on the other side, the hills on the side where the new school, new residency, new start will be, were lost to low cloud and there was a pull to the water, but it wasn’t cold. We watched the sky pinken and the sun set. We watched the eclipse on a small rocky promontory and then saw meteors shoot over head, and we stared out of that window, we stared and stared and stared. Mawddach has been a deeply creative, inspiring place for us. The world needs more spaces like this, where it is understood that art matters - that not only is it not frivolous to make, but that it would be frivolous not to make it. ..read more on Bonnie's substack. Bonnie Radcliffe substack
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |