by William Welstead
This paper situates itself on the borderlines between the literary and the visual arts. It examines recent collaborations in Wales between contemporary poets and visual artists, working with themes of pleasure in landscape and wildlife, and fear for its loss.
For John Ruskin, in Modern Painters, it is what is represented and said that determines greatness rather than whatever is in the ‘language of lines’ of the painter or the ‘language of words’ of the writer. Welsh landscape artist Kyffin Williams, felt that the visual arts should reinforce the idea of cynefin (which can mean habitat), designating for Williams ‘the place where you live and are naturally acclimatised’ that is already so well expressed in the poetry of Wales in both languages.
Firstly, the paper crosses the word/image borderline through the ekphrastic relationship between poet, Philip Gross and photographer, Simon Denison in I Spy Pinhole Eye in which Gross’s poems work from Denison’s pinhole photographs of electricity pylons. Secondly, it considers the long-standing collaboration between poet Gillian Clarke and painter Mary Lloyd Jones, for example as captions for her pictures, as well as their joint-working on a series of poems and paintings.
Biography
William Welstead is just starting his final year as PhD Student in the Deaprtment of English at Aberystwyth. The provisional title of his thesis is Braided narratives in Contemporary Welsh Ecopoetry in English.
