Williams illuminates the complex genesis of her installation Arcady (first exhibited 2012), and is suggestive in relation to my speculations about language above, when she writes:
I had spent a number of weeks on Ynys Enlli ( Bardsey Island) some years ago and began making a work with wire and velvet. Tough wire, hard to twist. I made lots of pieces which seems to suggest a kind of alphabet which you could not read. The beach was full of stuff like that. I had them lying around on the floor, first in the space on the island, then in my studio, then in sacks and eventually combined them with the chaise I had in my studio in a huge wave. I called it Arcady after a place near Odessa that had stayed in my mind on a visit to Ukraine in the early nineties (Email to the author, 21.04.2024).
Above: The artist at work on Arcady at Ynys Enlli . The images below are of details of Arcady as installed in different contexts – at Goat Major, Cardiff and at MUVIM, Valencia..
However, while Williams’ comments about the genesis of the installation deepen my appreciation of the richness of the work, I encounter the same limit in relation to the lyrical suspension of time through which a moment becomes a place. I have no doubt, however, that when in the physical presence of the work just such a suspension may well take place. Consequently all I can do here is evoke a congruence between the sense of what I have just written, the central implication of Williams’ installation Standing Silent (1994) and all it implies about her orientation to her own work, and her stated admiration for those qualities she finds in the work of Agnes Martin that I referenced earlier.
A point of departure?
In the end, what counts is not knowing whether you are for or against globalization, for or against the local; all that counts is understanding whether you are managing to register, to maintain, to cherish a maximum number of alternative ways of belonging to the world.
Bruno Latour (2018: 15-16)
This essay has followed a very particular, perhaps idiosyncratic, set of concerns. In consequence I have not touched on a great deal that is relevant to Lois Williams’ work. I believe it would be possible, for example, to extend the observations above by aligning them with Lisa Baraitser’s concern with the ‘re-animation of the seemingly “dead time” of maintenance work’ and the ‘intimate relationship between time and care’ (2017: 69) However, to have attempted this would have overextend this essay so that I will only suggest the line of thought such an approach might follow.
In addition to suggesting the possibility of aligning my speculations above with Baraitser’s work, I believe that, in doing so, it would be necessary to draw on Mary Watkins’ thinking on psychosocial accompaniment, in particular her critique of the professionalisation and consequent monopolisation of care that has marginalising citizens in relation to dwelling-as-preservation as a shared cultural value. In short, I believe Williams’ work articulates a concern, paraphrased in the quotation from Latour above, that relate to the borders that exist: ‘in and between our neighbourhoods, schools, faith communities, and workplaces’ (Watkins 2018: 28). That is, in and between the types of “place” where the collective maintenance of community, both human and more-than-human, is undertaken.
Since this inevitably suggest political questions, I will conclude by saying that engaging with Williams’ work has confirmed my sense that Gwyn Alf Williams’ and Bruno Latour’s views need not be seen as at odds with each other. In short, I believe that Lois Williams’ work, given its multiple topopoetic resonances, bears witness to the feminist philosopher Geraldine Finn’s observation that: ‘We are always both more and less than the categories that name and divide us …. (1996: 171), grounded as we are in the complexities and ambiguities of the multiple faces of identity and place. The implication of which belief, here, being that our reality will always both exceed and fall short of any intellectual categories deployed by either individuals or groups set on imposing hard-and-fast definitions concerning our sense of belonging and/or identity.
A personal postscript
I first saw Lois Williams’ work in 1975 and, later again, in 1990 when it was included in the touring exhibition New North. I then lost sight of it, ironically at the very time I was becoming increasingly engaged with issues of “in-between-ness” in relation to place and identity, not least in Wales.
By the end of the first decade of the present century I’d experienced at first hand some of the bitter consequences of centuries of English colonialisation there. For example, while working on the Holy Hiatus project in Cardigan, West Wales, I witnessed an angry exchange between local artists and artists from Cardiff, who were dismissed as “not really Welsh” because they did not speak the language. An exchange that nearly came to blows. By contrast, I have also had the privilege of working at Mynydd Epynt with the late Mike Pearson, professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Aberystwyth University (English by birth but Welsh-speaking).
Formally the home of a Welsh-speaking upland farming community, Mynydd Epynt was requisitioned in 1940 by the British Army and has remained under the control of the army as the Sennybridge Training Area. That period of work further sensitised me to the relationship between issues of belonging, identity, and the Welsh language. Later again my perception of those issues was further complicated again by an invitation to act as respondent at symposium at Aberystwyth University intended to celebrate the work of Clifford McLucas, also a Welsh-speaking Englishman and a key figure in the development of deep mapping. More recently I have been working with the Welsh collaborative Utopias Bach. All of which involvements have, I don’t doubt, coloured my response to William’s work. The modification of my perception, and with it my appreciation of Lois Williams’ work, will no doubt continue.
Acknowledgements
A number of people have been critical to enabling me to write this essay. First and foremost I owe a very substantial debt of gratitude to Lois Williams, who has patiently answered questions and, critically, provided me with the images of her work that are central to this essay. I am also indebted to Elinor Gwynn, Welsh poet and environmentalist, who is not only translating a shorter version of this essay into Welsh, but has also made the contact that may, we hope, result in its publication in that language. Both Elinor and Wanda Zyborska have supported me in the development of this essay by commenting on the text. Finally, the unintentional prompt to begin this essay came from another Welsh friend, the artist and poet Siân Barlow, who send me a copy of her deeply moving poem, In Between. A poem that, absorbed over time, returned me to Michael Tooby’s characterisation of Lois Williams’ state of being as “in-between”.
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