AGORA (2021) is a film I made for Cynfas (Celf Ar y Cyd), wherein artists, historians, archaeologists and composers were invited to create work inspired by objects from the collection of Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales. The theme of Issue 5 was CYNEFIN (Habitat), curated by Manon Awst.
I read somewhere that inside the spinal cord of a horse is a butterfly-shaped core of nerve cells. It’s an image that stays with me, just like ‘home’ does and all the images attached that bundle and emerge, taking flight. I was pulled towards a horse figurine found by ‘chance’ whilst digging in a garden in Pant-yr-Heol, Pentwyn Mawr (1949). I imagined a person moving towards a horse and a horse moving towards a person, the underlying communication here; of encounter and entanglement. It’s true, we are entangled with our habitat. The friction is scientific but full of poetry; as the landscape moves, an open-ended gesture.
Gleaning and translating from anatomical texts, I focus in on the cells of horses and the flight pattern of skylarks
rising vertically from the ground, powering upwards,
right down to the bog, where cotton grows bright
like a lantern amongst the grasses.
Within AGORA (In Greek, 'the gathering place', in Welsh an action verb 'to open' ), home is considered as a dance between self and place, bringing up the complexity the word "home" conjures up in itself: of domestic space and its sentimental-poetic failures. Using methods of collage and fragmentation from within and without the landscape, I draw upon Karen Barad's notions of entanglement as a fundamental state that moves away from the separation between ourselves and the spaces we inhabit, moving away from feelings of alienation towards feelings of communion and reciprocity, a subtle yet powerful approach to knowledge, communication and 'collaboration' between ourselves and the world we participate in.
References:
- Bronze horse figurine, 100 BCE–100 CE
- Found drawing of a horse (1985)
- Carneddau Mountains, Wales
- My Mother's manuscripts
- Brenda Chamberlain – Life-sized horses drawn directly onto the walls with charcoal and red ochre (Carreg Fawr, Ynys Enlli). Chamberlain waving goodbye to a boat from the island
- Patrick Farmer – Close mic hydrophone field recording of ice melting on Fachwen Pool (Newtown)
- Karen Barad, On Touching: The Alterity Within
- Joan Naviyuk Kane, “I am bound to everyone.”





