Veronica Calarco : Before the retreat

For the first blog post of this project, I have decided to give a bit of information about the development of the project:

For the past six-years I have been doing a PhD at Aberystwyth University (though I have been working on the subject for much longer). The PhD is titled This is a language warning and was a creative investigation into the visualisation of an endangered language realised through the notion of country. It used a minority language to displace the dominant language with which both languages interact. The endangered language, Gunnai/Kŭrnai, is in the process of being awoken and the minority language, Cymraeg, was endangered and is still under threat. The dominant language is English, which although it could not be fully removed was displaced from its usual central positioning in a decolonial strategy. Through a process of printmaking, painting and installation, the visual research and the supporting exegesis aimed to contribute to the discussions on language extinction. 

A PhD is a complete research project in itself, but during the course of the PhD research, there were tracks I did not follow to the end and research I limited for the sake of not overwhelming both myself and my audience (and to fit within the exhibition and research boundaries). Three of these have come together to form the basis of this new body of research, which will form my Post doc research which is funded by a Joy Welch research grant and supported by Stiwdio Maelor.

For my first blog post for this project I thought I would write about these three fundamentals that forms the basis of the research for this project. 

Yr hyn a welaf … : gweld

In Cymraeg the word gweld means ‘to see’. Dw i’n dy weld di. ‘I see you’. Gweld also means: to perceive, inquire, see fit, understand, examine and seem (appear). In English, the verb ‘to see’ also means to perceive by the eye, look about, give or pay attention, imagine as a possibility, form a mental picture, discover, acknowledge or consider something, pay attention, make an investigation or inquiry. When making and presenting art, artists try to perceive by eye, to inquire, to imagine as a possibility, to examine, to investigate, to consider something, to acknowledge, to pay attention and to ask viewers to consider and to pay attention. With this project, I wanted the research to explore what both the artists who participate and myself gweld. To use the seeing by the artists and the seeing of the artists and their process as the research. This seeing as practice-led research and resulting exhibitions allows research to be disseminated in a different way from written research, permitting a wider audience to be impacted by the research and a different conversation to occur.

Y tir … : The land

This multi-disciplinary art research project responds to the history/story of the land, language and land, a sense of place, the environmental and rewilding movements and the positioning of land by outsiders as other - a visual / playground commodity (tourism) in Wales.

It uses environmental theorists Anne Whiston Spirn’s and Val Plumwood theories of listening and acknowledging the land’s agency to provide a new way to interrogate land’s current and historical usage and interrogate artists in Wales response to the collaborative action between language and land, and the diverse people who claim and use the land (from the original inhabitants to incomers to casual tourists). 

This project will question what the term landscape encompasses. Is it the human view of what is seen outside – a view of the country, a cityscape, an industrial landscape? Something we are part of or something we are removed from, observing from a distance? Veronica Strang described landscape as a space that is traditionally characterised by the non-indigenous as “a humanized, acted-on, and defined space” with the word being used to describe a particular view or vista reflecting the “increasingly detached and distanced vision of the environment” (Strang 51). Anne Whiston Spirn theorises that landscape is not a static composition or a passive backdrop to human theatre but the material home, the thing that connects people and place (Spirn 16-17). Like Plumwood, who asks “why does the concept of a cultural landscape privilege human agency over the other agencies and credit this force exclusively with the creation of the land we view?” (Plumwood "The Concept of a Cultural Landscape, Nature, Culture and Agency in the Land" 122-3), Whiston Spirn also argues that humans are not the sole authors of landscape, crediting the volcanoes, the rain, the shade of trees, the falling leaves as all contributing to creating the landscape (Spirn 17).

Yr artisiad … : The artists

One of the issues that arises in a visual arts PhD is the question of how does visual art contribute to research? Artist Dr Sue Kneebone stated that ‘artists have the facility to offer more profound insights … and have been important in bringing new points of view and ways of seeing’. As this project is a studio based research project, it will explore how contemporary Wales based artists are creating a visual response to the cultural life of Wales, especially how it pertains to the linguistic and environmental issues. It will answer what knowledge can studio-based enquiry reveal that may not be revealed by other modes of enquiry?, a question asked by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt.

Using visual art as research responds to world-leading linguist and authority on endangered languages, Professor David Crystal’s statement[1] that “if we want Them[2] to see what the situation is the artists can help us more than anyone else”[3]. Crystal argued that, though lecturing and academic books play an important role in forming intellectual opinion, they only reach a small, selected audience and thus the information needs to be disseminated in other ways[4]. Practice-led research and exhibitions are a valid way to disseminate research, permitting a wider audience to be impacted by the research and a different conversation to occur. Thus, for this project, I decided to invite artists to participate in the project as part of the research. The project will end with an exhibition (or two) as the final presentation of the research. 

The hosting venue … : Stiwdio Maelor

The majority of the retreats will be hosted at Stiwdio Maelor. Maelor is an artist in residence program I established in 2014. Over the first five years 250 artists have completed residencies at Maelor. In 2020, Maelor had to go into a temporary hiatus whilst we all lived through a pandemic. Thanks to this I have had a chance to reimagine Maelor by creating a print room and a weaving room and discovering new ways to host artists.

[1] Keynote speech at 2003 UNESCO International Expert Meeting on Endangered Languages, Crystal, David "Crossing the Great Divide", 2003 

[2] The unknowing public 

[3] Crystal, David "Crossing the Great Divide", 2003, p4.

[4] Crystal, David "Crossing the Great Divide", 2002, p 2-4