Collaborations
The Water Diviner's Tale - With Composer Rachel Portman
Owen's recent collaboration with Oscar winning composer Rachel Portman on The Water Diviner's Tale, a dramatic song-cycle about climate change, was premiered in the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms 2007.
Review from the Guardian:
 music.guardian.co.uk/proms2007
Owen recently collaborated with Welsh singer and songwriter Fflur Daffydd at the Crossing Borders festival in the Hague. Owen and Fflur also performed at the 2008 Hay Festival.
www.myspace.com/fflurdafydd
Wales: Dead or Alive? Cymru: yn Fyw neu'n Farw?
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Dan Llywelyn Hall Artist
After stumbling across a copy of Owen Sheer’s Blue Book, I was drawn to the visual references that Owen often incorporates in his poetry. I immediately thought about our similarities in our subject matter and the parallels that could be drawn from our mutual feelings of Wales.
I set about making contact with Owen to discuss the possibility of collaboration and whether or not he would be interested in contributing work to form an exhibition.
Following a number of meetings in both Cardiff and London we eventually decided on the title:
Wales: Dead or Alive?
For me, this title is particularly relevant in the position that Wales holds as a country. As a nation we are proud. I personally have mixed feelings towards my homeland, often conflicting. Therefore, the title will provoke an immediate response in the viewer be it positive or negative.
We decided that a touring exhibition would be appropriate and that it would be interesting to hold at least one exhibition outside of Wales.
Owen gave me the opportunity to look at a large proportion of his poetry and I selected 12 poems to form the basis of our touring exhibition.
It was my job to select poetry that would be relevant and interesting to use as an inspiration to my artwork.
I set about working on each piece individually and making constant referrals to the poetry to direct and conjure the imagery that you can see in the prints.
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Owen Sheers Poet
Whenever a poem is published, its meanings, its resonance, leave the world of the poet and are made available to interpretation, either in the text of the critic or in the mind of the reader. Ted Hughes touches upon this process of interpretive transition when he describes a poem as a house built by the poet. Each reader of that poem inhabits it, and makes it their own, furnishing it with their own experiences and associations. But what if a reader wanted to interpret a poem through another medium? Not textually or literarily, but visually? What if they wanted to interpret, not through a process of transition but translation?
This was the question I faced when Dan first approached me with the idea for this project. He would take 12 of my poems and interpret them visually, both exploring and reflecting their meaning, language and imagery through his own techniques of screen-printing. He would ‘move in’ to my poetic houses, and be given a free rein. Bring down walls, let rip with the paintbrush, give them a total, Changing Rooms makeover if he wanted.
The prospect was a liberating one. Writing is about choice. Every line, image, phrase could be said another way, or not at all. Does that word stay or go? Which, from the multiple angles of entry into a poem, do you choose? This is what writing is. Making the right choices, the choices that your subject and the poem deserve. With this project, however, the weight of choice was taken from my shoulders. Dan would choose the 12 poems from my published and unpublished work. There was no prompting by me. They are not the 12 I would have chosen. I don’t even particularly like some of them anymore. But that didn’t matter, because the process of free interpretation began with that choice. And it continued. I was keen that Dan worked from the poems themselves, and not from the poet. I didn’t want to give him background, explanations, and to be fair, he didn’t ask. And that’s just as well – trust the tale not the teller. Once written, poems know more about themselves than the poet ever will.
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| The singing men
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Y gaer
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Steelworks
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Stammer on scree
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Patchworks
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Prints for sale
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As the printed layers increased, the screen printing process allowed me to work directly on to the silk screen and create intuitive images that were not prepared or preconceived. I found myself constantly considering the relationship between image and text and building the images piecemeal. This uncertainty in the creative process prevents the creeping rationality that can sometimes remove feeling from a piece of work.
The format of the prints allows the viewer a chance to ponder over the relationship between the image and the poetry and at the same time allows each art form its necessary space to stand alone.
I have not attempted to provide illustrations for Owen’s poetry but visual alternatives that frieze that moment when an affinity with the text is made. It would be foolish to assume that my images are the definitive answers to the poetry; everybody will respond according to their own visual vocabulary.
The elements of each print often make use of ephemera. I have made use of photographic imagery to direct the viewer into a certain transience that makes reference to memory. Owen’s poetry often describes memory and its implications. A sense of melancholy arises as we are directed into comparing our emotions with his. The bridge to understanding poetry is memory.
I would hope that this exhibition draws attention to the relationship between image and text and at the very least provokes a response.
There is no cryptic answer to the title. Each print… image and poem combined reflects upon a unique experience. Personally, I have reached no conclusion whilst making the work; I prefer the lingering question mark to remain in the viewer’s territory. I believe it is necessary for people like Owen and myself to constantly challenge our culture in order to strengthen its existence.
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Dan Llywelyn Hall was born in Cardiff in 1980. After graduating from the University of Westminster in 2002 Dan started out as an illustrator for various newspapers and magazines including the Independent on Sunday.
He has since exhibited paintings and prints extensively in galleries across Wales and England. More recently Dan had work included in a group show at Waterhouse & Dodd Gallery, Cork Street, London where his work was purchased by Sir Christopher Bland to form part of a collection for BT’s central office. Dan also has work purchased by Barclays Bank and many more notable collections.
In 2003, Dan was awarded the prestigious title as the ‘Sunday Times Young Artist of the Year’ and had his work featured and reviewed in the Culture supplement of the Sunday Times. Over recent years Dan has also been short-listed as the ‘Welsh Artist of the Year’ on two separate occasions.
Link to Dan Llywelyn Hall's website:
www.danllywelynhall.co.uk
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And then there was silence… until Dan called me up 6 months later and asked me to come and have a look at the first eight prints. He laid them out in his studio, just the images, no titles, no poems. And that was the first surprise. I didn’t know which image was a response to which poem. I didn’t recognise my own poems, translated as they were, into Dan’s screen prints. At least not straight away. I looked again, and I think, in a different way. Not so literally, but with a broader gaze, and that’s when they began to identify themselves. And this is one of the reasons I like Dan’s work. The images appear immediately naive, accessible, simple. They are, however, layered, just as a good poem is, and it’s only on a second pass that you see the skull in the Singing Men, the tassels and the birds of Valentine, the machines of Steelworks. I also like the combined approach of sweep and detail – the motivation, the tone of the poems are conveyed in those broad brush strokes, the juxtaposition of colours, while just one or two images are chosen to illustrate meaning and subject matter. This is, ideally, how I’d like my own images to work in a poem. Pinpointing and focusing the visual imagination within a wider emotional or narrative experience.
At the time of writing I’ve not yet seen the images and poems combined, but I hope they’ll work together in this territory of layered meaning. I may be wrong, but I think a viewer’s eye will be drawn to the screen print first, which will provide a backwash, a tonal blue screen for the poem, which will, in turn send the eye back to the image, where the text will reveal new elements in the work. Maybe, maybe not…
So, what has this got to do with Wales: Dead or Alive? Well, as I said, at the start of this project choice was taken away from me, so although I did have a say in the project’s title, I didn’t have a say in the poems that would reflect it. But I will say this. That the title was born of shared ground, shared experience. When we met both Dan and I realised that we had similar ideas and emotions towards Wales. We felt inspired by our culture and our country, and we felt frustrated. We were both interested in engaging with Welsh history, particularly in our respective art forms, and yet we both wanted Wales to live now, in the modern world, unfettered by its history. The most important part of the title for me, though, is the missing word. Wanted. Dead or alive, past or present, we both wanted to understand our relationships with modern Wales. Some of the screen prints overtly reflect these ideas of Wales, others would seem not to, but all of them are informed by growing up in the country. This may not be immediately obvious, but as with my experience on first seeing the prints, it sometimes helps to look beyond the surface. So, yes, while Harvest is a love poem, it is also about man and nature. Similarly, Valentine is not just a poem about a lover’s argument. It is also about what we choose to remember. Memory, the past, can fetter or propel, and it’s up to us to choose which. Choice again, as ever, it all comes back to choice.
Notes for sales guidance
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