This week has been delicious, spent in West Wales on a rural smallholding. I have been painting a mural and teaching yoga to the lovely family who are hosting me. Alongside these offerings, I write, draw, walk, rest, sleep, wild swim and talk to friendly pet sheep.
Art residencies are a strange one for artists like myself who are in some areas self-taught and/or have evolved a practice via community arts. It can be a mysterious world, one I personally have found hard to access. A few months ago, I decided to start my own creative residency travels via the open road in Beryl Bach (my beloved little van). Reaching out to networks not primarily aimed at artists has been very fruitful – this beautiful place I find myself in was found on the Diggers and Dreamers facebook group. Rather than complete a complicated application with too many words about my practice, I offer some practical skills in exchange for time and space. Here are some images of the mural - inspired by images of Frieda Kahlo and the story of flower-faced Blodeuwedd from the Mabinogion.
A short story follows, inspired by my dreamings about what might happen if these two women met…
Flower-faced in her headdress of blooms, Frieda paints roots around her neck to tether herself to ground. Accustomed to leaving her body in efforts to escape pain or enter visions, it is hard at times to find it again. The tree outside her window speaks to her at night, and in her imagination she travels into the forest to meet the creatures that live there. This very night, when Diego is with his mistress, she will journey to be with them.
The familiar calls of a nearby tecolote sing into half-sleep. With eyes closed, Frieda is running in air across distances she cannot fathom in her limited, compressed human form. No longer weighed down by sticks she sheds the corsets designed to keep her upright, free of metal and men. Enough momentum now for Frieda to lift from the earth which pains her so, up towards the canopies and creatures of her heart. Towards the long, low song she flies on the wings of dreams.
Flung through tree and branch, Frieda is not expecting another car crash yet her journey makes her re-live it all, again. The jolts and bumps against branches remind her she is real, and her pain is part of the stars. Against bark bigger than her, she is forced to stop and crumple into the hard, steady form, suspended far above ground. All is darkness.
Frieda feels a hand gently stroking her temple. The lightness of affection makes her smile, sigh, open her eyes a little. The vision before jolts Frieda into wide-eyed waking. If standing at this moment, her feet would not continue to hold. For some moments, it is uncertain that her lungs will help her breathe.
Met with the most beautiful face she has ever seen, Frieda beholds an unearthly creature. The woman leaning over her is adorned with flowers. One eye is of this world, the other is owl-like. Both gaze at Frieda with a compassion older than time and continents. It is one of those meetings where the world starts to revolve differently, where the story leaps off the page and dances.
After sharing her name – Blodeuwedd – the half feathered woman begins to tell her story. Created by men as a wife for Lleu, she tricked the man she didn’t want to marry and tried to take his kingdom as queen with her chosen love by her side. These bold plans were intercepted, and as punishment she was turned into an owl. She speaks with integrity, without a trace of shame. “I would rather live amongst the land of creatures, than have my path mapped out for me as wife of man”.
(They took the) flowers of the oak, and the flowers of the broom, and the flowers of the meadowsweet, and from those they conjured up the fairest and most beautiful maiden anyone had ever seen. And they baptized her in the way that they did at that time, and named her Blodeuwedd.
- The Mabinogion
Frieda tells her story too, of her accident and physical limitations, the lost babies, her passionate yet unhappy marriage to Diego.
It becomes clear that these two women have met on a soul-plane. Neither in México or Cymru, they entwine across time and space up here amongst the treetops. Both flower-faced, fleeing earthly constraints and ties. We all know that women sharing their stories changes how we inhabit time, and bonds between women create wings to transcend certain situations. These kinds of meetings, under these kinds of circumstances, are sweetly cataclysmic. The air is thick with a romance that has no language. One person here has been created from myth, the other has made herself the subject of her own mythology. Together, they are writing new stories. They talk all night.
Years, decades may have passed – Frieda is unsure of how long, when she begins to feel a pull back down to earth. She does not want to leave this unfolding mystery, but must, as her own creation of her life calls as softly and deeply as owl song. She begins to cry, and Blodeuwedd gently wipes away her tears with fingers and feathers. Enfolding Frieda in her wings, Blodeuwedd whispers “I am always here, in this place near the stars”. Taking a white feather from her arm, she plants it in Frieda’s flower crown. “We have our own work to do, our own stories to live”. Joining hands, they travel together through the layers of canopy, down the tree roots for what again, feels like a long, long time until they reach a very dark, deep place far beneath the earth’s surface.
Here, they kiss, their stories and bodies fusing as one. Floating in this rooted freedom, Frieda feels herself drifting gradually away from Blodeuwedd, from this place of dreams and visions. She stops clinging to her half-human love, and lets her body fall back into the darkness. Finding familiar patterns in carpets and curtains, she is back in her own house, bedroom, bed, body. She opens her eyes, and speaks out loud. “Who needs feet, when I have wings to fly?”.