I am the listening artist. A community based artist, who is living on the relational threads, being shaped by the environment it creates. Deeply influenced by care. I hold creativity as exploration. Welsh as a smaller language sits underneath my practice as a place of thinking and making. A way of shaping perspective for me, new understanding and ways to connect. Dialect names of nature, and understanding the power of sharing words. It’s a smaller language which connects me to the landscape. I am it, it is me and us.

Over the years my method has stayed the same even as the work has moved through very different forms. I listen. I run in joy and sit with grief. I witness stories and then I share them back into the world in different ways. When you truly listen you learn the art of care.
I began by exploring landscape through performance. I’ll be honest I am warm and silly and a product of where I come from. Embedded in cymuned thinking and I embrace the art of openness. Rurality.

So it is no wonder I started working with farmers through Cymylau Tystion, co-creating artworks that toured across Europe. The farmers made zoetropes, brought in their lives and objects. I witnessed that. The link between language, place, cynefin. I called it listening because I didn’t have another word for it at the time. I asked what to make, giving up creative control, and what it meant to be from here. The farmers taught me how to refind myself through them. I pretended to be a tractor and shovelled poo. At one point the NRW was called because I was in a bath in a field. At another, farmers moved a tractor rally to bring a vintage tractor into the work. That’s what happened. The work formed through that exchange. My gift is moving with people. 300 people came and many had never stepped into an exhibition space.

After that came a small language festival, building on the same thread, smaller language contexts, linguistic visibility, the question of how place speaks and is spoken back to. Then I worked within Capital of Culture TOSTA as a curator supporting international exchange through smaller language and visual art. By continuing to connect I found the threads to make work that supported isolated small language communities reach across the tides.
Co-curation is a word I learned later. At the time I was just in it, slightly naive. I never thought it was about me anyway. When you come from nooks, you see a landscape where you have to constantly learn and your community is the breath of life. So my practice widened into ecology, environment, and community work. Each step led by relationship. No silos. Just open air and ground underfoot. Muddy boots.

I care about the link between linguistic diversity and biodiversity. I look and see the beauty of the hedgerow, multiplicity. Permaculture in action. I use agricultural spaces and turn them into spaces of performance and joy. On residency with Ynys Enlli, I turned cattle feeders into a disco space. With Insepnatureity of Nature, in collaboration with Joanna Bond, I turned polytunnels into a spa for women at lunch.

I work regeneratively using seeds as a way of holding and gathering stories. But I don’t do this alone. I grow through others. Through partners and friends. I am a ripple in a wider system. When I worked with a dementia café and a toddler group, we sowed seeds together and shared stories. That work led to Welsh Government funding for accessible planters, shaped directly from those exchanges, reminding us why culture matters in how we grow. Art has become a way of sharing understanding and learning together, making us all learners.

I have made site-specific performance and engagement work. I have worked with Marc Rees in Aberystwyth as an engagement producer for Aberetwm.

I have also worked in conservation, co-curating and designing engagement, pop-up exhibitions around flood planning for environmental change. I start in place. I respond to what is already there. I work with people, for people. I am an artist who will make work with anyone, anywhere and do.
I’ve made street postcards and turned them into poetry, mapping places and linking them across other areas. I have worked in curatorial and facilitation roles, including with Story Studios, where I co-created spaces using mapping and small exhibitions that supported community development with Bro and Severn Wye. Bringing all the community groups with me and we make and change.

More recently I worked on an Arts Council Wales project in a school setting. We used critique as a tool. The brief was about liking where we live, but it didn’t land with the 9 to 11 year olds. So we shifted it. We worked instead with everyday heroes, redesigning the place we were in. That led to letters of funding and support. Cynefin to civic change through knitting Nana’s and street design. That’s the power of critique. Yes, it could have failed. But if you want kids to be everyday heroes then equip them with the tools to be that. Let them be their values and stand on their behalf. The Children’s Commissioner sent us a letter.

Everything I do comes back to people, and what can be made together. I bring joy and a sense of movement into those spaces. I stay with what happens when people are given space to shape their own stories. Then I close the loop and regenerate, as I wander over systems and sectors in a creative place-based way. Always making, always learning.

I listen.

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Below is the Artist Statement I wrote with a farmer and friend in a pub over ten years ago, its both the way I think and a testament to the power of sharing creativity.

ENG BELOW
Mae’n gas gyda fi wneud datganiadau artist. Â dweud y gwir yn onest, mae’n gas gyda fi eu darllen nhw hefyd. Ydych chi’n eu mwynhau nhw?

Rwyf fi’n gweithio fel artist achos fy mod i’n dwli ar gelf. Mae’n rhan ohonof fi. Hwn yw’n hanfod i. A’r unig beth rwyf fi’n gwybod amdano. Hanfod fy ngwaith yw ceisio cyfathrebu, yn eglur ac yn ddealladwy, heb fod yn nawddoglyd a heb eithrio neb.

Rwyf fi’n credu bod celf sy’n taro deuddeg yn cyrraedd pob un sydd â diddordeb. Ac i mi mae pethau fel ego ac ansicrwydd a hanes personol yr artist yn llyffethair i’r gwaith ac yn ddi-angen.

Rwyf fi’n artist sy’n gwrando, sy’n ystyried pobl a lle yn bethau pwysig iawn. Ieithoedd y pethau hyn, a’u hanesion, sy’n gyrru deinameg fy ngwaith. Dim ond ar ôl dod yn gynefin â nhw y byddaf yn penderfynu ar gyfrwng neu gyfryngau fy ymateb – ai ar ffurf barddoniaeth a pherfformiad ynteu fideo a sain, ar ffurfiau technolegol neu ddiwylliannol eraill ynteu ar gyfuniad o sawl un. Mae gwyddoniaeth, fel celf, yn destun rhyfeddod i mi, ac rwyf fi wrth fy modd yn gwneud defnydd o sgiliau gwyddoniaeth a thechnoleg yn fy ngwaith.

Rwyf fi’n artist dwyieithog, ac mae hynnu’n helpu fi i ddeall bod sawl haenen gwahanol o ganfyddiad i’w chael, a fel mae’r gwahanol ffyrdd o weld a deall y byd yn cyd-fyw. Ar ben hynny mae fy ymwybyddiaeth yn cynyddu o’r holl bethau nad all celf ddim â’i ddweud, ac o ba mor fawr yw’r cyfran hwnnw o unrhyw brofiad sydd y tu hwnt i allu celf i’w gyflwyno. O achos hynny rwyf fi’n hoffi dilyn trywydd sy’n defnyddio dwy iaith a sawl synnwyr, trywydd sydd o’r herwydd yn rhoi mwy o gyfle i ni ‘glywed‘ – i gymryd i mewn a threfnu, a gweld rheswm, yn y byd o’n cwmpas a’i brofiadau.Mae fy null gwaith yn un cydweithredol.

Rwyf fi’n gwybod o brofiad bod pobl yn dysgu mwy amdan eu hunain drwy gydwneud â phobl eraill na thrwy weithio ar eu pennau eu hunain. Mae diwylliant a chymuned yn bethau mor ddwys, mor amlochroga mor amlhaenog, fel bod gwahanol bersonoliaethau a’u ffyrdd gwahanol o weld y byd yn gallu agor ffenestri dealltwriaeth a chynnig ffyrdd ymlaen sydd nid yn unig yn newydd a dadlennol, ond sydd hefyd yn ddefnyddiol i’r rhai hynny sy’n dewis cydweithio.

Mae celf i mi’n beth syml, mewn sawl ffordd. Mae’n proses o ddysgu, o dyfu ac o roi, o gael eich harwain a’ch ysbrydoli gan bobl sy’n annwyl i chi, a gan bobl sy’n newydd i chi.Mae’n golygu hefyd ymateb yn onest, yn garedig ac yn haelionus i sefyllfaoedd a phobl, i lefydd a’u hanes. Mae’n golygu gwrthod cael eich caethiwo gan ragdybiaethau; a becso digon i weithio drwy’r dydd, bob dydd am wythnosau i greu rhywbeth yr ydych chi’n credu sy’n beth o werth, ac a fydd yn cyfoethogi bywydau pobl eraill. Ac mae’n golygu bod yn barod i wrthryfela.

Wele fi.

I hate writing artist’s statements. To be honest, I hate reading them too. Do you enjoy them?

I work as an artist because I love it. Art is embedded in me; it’s what I am, and it’s all I know. I just seek to communicate clearly and accessibly, without patronising or alienating anyone, at any stage in the process. I believe that if art’s good enough, it will reach anyone who’s interested. The artist’s ego, history and insecurities I see as unnecessary baggage.

I’m a listening artist, and people and places are very important to me. Their language and their narratives create the dynamics of my art. Only after getting a feel for these do I begin to decide what mediums I might use in response – perhaps poetry and performance, perhaps video and sound, perhaps other technologies or cultural forms. Perhaps a combination of several.

I’m a bilingual artist, and that helps me to understand how many different layers of perception exist, and how different ways of seeing and understanding exist alongside each other.

I’m increasingly aware too, of all the things art can’t say, and how much of any experience it just can’t catch. So I’m drawn to multi-sensory and bilingual approaches that give us more chance to ‘clywed’ – make sense of and categorise – the world and experiences round us.

I’m a collaborative artist. In my experience, people learn more about themselves by working together, than by working alone. Cultures and communities are so dense, multi-faceted and multi-layered that different personalities and patterns of perception can open up understandings, and offer useful ways forward, for all of us involved in a collaboration.

Art’s a simple thing to me, in many ways. It’s a process of learning and growing and giving, of being guided and inspired by people you love, and people you meet. It’s about responding honestly, kindly and generously to situations, people, places and their stories. About refusing to be trapped by preconceptions. About caring enough to work all day, for days and weeks, to create something you believe is worthwhile, and will enrich others. And about being willing to rebel.

That’s me.