Tir Cwiar / On Your Face
One of ten Wales-based queer artists chosen to work with On Your Face Collective’s year-long Queering Wales, Connecting People project, in collaboration with Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea and Elysium Gallery, Swansea. Delivering an online workshop ‘Alchemical Nature: grounding neurodivergent art practice in making colour from plants, earth and metals’,along with a well-attended in-person Hawthorn Ink-Making Workshop at Elysium Gallery.
The year-long project culminated in the group exhibition Tir Cwiar//Queer Land at Elysium, featuring my new place-based installation work, adverse camber and documentation of GRIND//GROUND performance work made in the Preseli Hills in September 2025.
Working over a year with this group of queer Welsh artists, organisers and curators was a game-changer. To have returned to my rural west walian roots and found artist peers to connect and collaborate with challenged the assumptions I had about having to be a masked and closeted queer person in my professional work. Tir Cwiar not only centred queerness; it centred the full humanity of each artist and our shared relationship with land, Wales, and the other-than-human. It allowed me to experiment with new ways of making work and facilitating workshops. The intersectionally inclusive working practice of On Your Face freed up creative energy in me to be bigger and bolder within my work, evidencing how vital EDI work is to give people the freedom and opportunities to be more themselves within their communities and creative and professional lives. Removing barriers liberates.
adverse camber
There is this valley...
An installation exploring relationship to place, love, loss and the matter of things.
There is this valley.
Where he was born.
Where he worked, moulding and breaking the land, when I was born.
Where she died.
Sandstone blasted in the name of progress.
A cairn in honour.
Salt to wash the sins.
Hawthorn to heal the heart.
- Sandstone (Stepaside bypass/Wooden, Pembrokeshire)
- Hawthorn (Wooden, Pembrokeshire)
- Copper Pipe (Wooden, Pembrokeshire)
To learn more about this piece and practice, head over here.
Hawthorn Ink-Making Workshop
at Elysium Gallery, Swansea
Sharing this relating and creating with plants with folks always touches the heart, and particularly when working with Hawthorn; a plant of the heart.
It is in the gathering of people, the conversation and the dialogues with plants, place, colour, the collective and personal depths alongside play that I find a sense of meaning. A fortification in the knowledge that we are so much better together and that we all have something to offer. That process is queen, and making a non- judgemental space to experiment and learn is no small thing.
Alongside all that folks shared about what they were taking away from this short time of meeting, I took away a bolstering of the belief that anything that provides a place to be together, with the human and other than human, in sweet and simple ways, is a very goodand vital thing.
Documentation from GRIND::GROUND
Preseli Hill Performance
