Arts Trail – Boia Festival, St. Davids

Modrwy Diemwnt – sonic and visual art installation by Carmarthenshire-based sound artist/composer, Richard James (formerly of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci) and St Davids-based painter, Tony Kitchell.

There is really here – a short art/sci-fi film installation by internationally exhibited St Davids-based artist and researcher, Ben Lloyd.

Modrwy Diemwnt – sonic and visual art installation,
Free entry.
Seion Chapel, main building, New Street, St Davids.
Fri 25-Thu 31 October, 10 am – 6 pm.
(Note that this exhibition runs to theThursday after the festival to include half term week)

Sound artist, Richard James, and painter, Tony Kitchell, are collaborating to create a sound and visual art installation with the shared themes of community, environment, and climate change.

Richard has created a series of immersive 5.1 surround sound and music pieces which flow in to one another to complement Tony Kitchell’s artwork, Modrwy Diemwnt, within their shared and collaborative overarching themes of nature, environment, and climate. The installation will be presented at Capel Seion, St Davids, as a part of the Boia festival, which opens on Friday, October 25th, 2024.
Included in Richard’s compositions are natural sounds recorded in the environment in Pembrokeshire, including the musical characteristics of local Preseli blue stones at Carn Menyn (famous for being part of Stone Henge in Wiltshire). A section of the recording also includes the voice of fifteen year old Lili Williams, relaying her thoughts on climate change and the climate emergency, looking ahead to the future, and recorded conversations with her friends and contemporaries. The artist Accü also contributes harp and vocal to some of the pieces.
The compositions are inspired by the landscapes of west Wales, the urgency for action on the climate emergency, and ancient pagan relationships to nature, highlighting the need for a reawakening and new appreciation of a symbiotic and respectful relationship with the natural world, in the transition to cleaner energy production, which is less destructive to the natural environment than the extraction and burning of fossil fuels.
A stereo mix of the music produced for the surround sound installation will be available to download from the Evolution Of Beauty Bandcamp page from the opening day of the festival, with a suggested donation to a climate and/or social justice charity. https://evolutionofbeauty.bandcamp.com

Tony’s work, co-created with local school children, will include a large visual art piece suspended in the chapel, inspired by the visual experience of a total eclipse of the Sun, often referred to as a diamond ring, modrwy diement in Welsh, due to the black disc of the Moon being ringed by the Sun’s thin firey corona against the darkness of space. Tony will be using charcoal made from bushes which caught fire on the cliffs near St. Davids in the heat wave of 2022 (caused by climate change). He has also utilised recycled materials in its construction. https://www.studio6stdavids.com

There is really here – a short art/sci-fi film installation 
Free entry.
Seion Chapel Vestry, New Street, St Davids.
Fri 25-Sun 27 October, 10 am – 6 pm.

The first woman of the future smashes through the glass wall of the totalitarian state and into primeval nature.

The film, directed by Ben Lloyd and produced by Fiksa, will be on show here in both Welsh and English on a loop throughout the three days of the festival. The script was adapted from utopian literature and primarily uses text from the book ‘We’ by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924), the dystopian novel that inspired George Orwell’s ‘1984’, amongst others.

The film is part of a larger project, The Utopian Impulse, which sets out to reappraise our psychic link to the natural world, re-evaluate the different consciousnesses we can experience through creative acts, and remove the artist from the linear perspective of time.
The perennial positioning of utopia in the forever delayed future or on some distant unreachable shore is a false narrative that helps to manufacture consent. An aim of the project is to help us wake up from this false consciousness and see, that we’ve always been here in time and space. Indivisibly here. There is really here, utopia is here and now. https://benglloyd.co.uk/