Dylan Huw's commissioned text: Wal fôr It’s a site to gather around. It’s a world to dive into. It’s a world. It’s an underworld. To be enveloped by. It’s a world to gather inside. It’s a place to drown. To throw, be thrown, taflwn eiriau ato gan obeithio neith rhywbeth lynnu. That something will lake. It’s a place to be born. It is ninety per cent. It is multiplying, mae bobman, there is too much and not enough. Movements and actions echo. From deep inside, from under. Sounds reverberate. Action echoes, movement deepens. Here we are landforms, sediment. The Welsh word for lagoon is morlyn, morlynnoedd: sea lakes – the opposite of an island. A place to sink, to collect. Dyma fyd i fod ac i foddi ynddo. We are here, lakeside, yes, yma. Dyma ddelweddau, dyma ddawns. Dwi’n chwilio am siâp i roi’r holl iaith yma ynddo. Chwilio am lyn neu fôr neu bwll neu ffynnon o eiriau wneith siarad gyda’r delweddau rhain. Ceisio bod gyda’u rhythmau. Ceisio llifo. I’m looking for a shape, for a container. For a method of reflecting (of responding) (of reckoning) which vibrates on somehow similar frequencies to the watery rhythms of your work’s images, the incantatory hum of its soundscape. Seinfydoedd o ahhhs a mmms sy’n gofyn ein bod ni’n gofyn a gofyn mwy, o’r delweddau, o’n ieithoedd, o’r llefydd ry’n ni’n sefyll, gorwedd, arnofio. Is a language submerged what I am looking for? Let’s see. Do you know the Welsh word for exploring is archwilio, which you might translate directly to on/searching. Or onlooking. Our mutual friend Simon hated the overuse of the word “explore” in arts contexts and drilled that hatred in to me. We should say what we mean, we should mean what we say. Shouldn’t we? I cannot wait to dance later. Dechrau. You start at an almost Jarman Blue. The waves, which is to say movement itself, almost invisible. Into the flat blue plain I read a generative unseeing. The blue accounts for an emptiness charged with thought and feeling and experience, willing, willing its looker to be oceanic, to speculate, swim, jump in. A while back I wrote about the way blue is everything (and everything is blue) in Kath’s work. You and Rhys came to stay for the opening; we stayed at the gay bar till past closing. Can you believe that was two years ago? Your blue is quick to unflatten, to melt from abstraction into something approaching legibility. From inside the blue emerges a triad of human figures, around them their shadows. The way these shadows announce themselves and capture our attention, overcoming even their writhing host bodies: this is what lingered most the first time I saw these images. Dawns o olau a glas, sy’n awgrymu edrychiad tu hwnt i safbwynt dynol, sy’n mynd a ni a sy’n dod o rhywle arall. A dance of light and body and blue. A choreography that transcends a solely human perspective, that succumbs to the elements’ intentions, that is water itself. The kind of meaning we sometimes call context collates, like sediment, around the edges of the images. Ymgasglaf yr iaith nes bod rhywbeth fel pwrpas yn datgan ei hun, atalnodi’r delweddau fel y tonnau ar y sgrîn. Foamy waves punctuate. By the time we see the figures dance in a greyed sea they and you have established a hypnotic grip on our senses. Their movements, like the sounds, begin to stutter and glitch. To slow down. Our attention redirected towards the unknowable choreographies—the ageless in(ter)dependence—of our waters. The whirring soundtrack intensifies a feeling of being in (of being of) a place that is not here. The bird’s eye (or extraterrestrial) view, its still framing of a depopulated expanse, the expectant gentleness of your film’s tempo and command of its fades to blue further sharpen the feeling that ‘we’ are at a remove. At a remove from what? The water-image, the imaged water, the depths that we cannot see. It strikes me I know nothing of the depths of the ocean. That there are things I know, and the depths of the ocean is alien to all of them. Efallai mai dyma pam dwi’n erfyn, erfyn ar y geiriau yma i fod gyda’r delweddau, i gymryd eu ffurf, i fod yn fodlon â rhythm tebyg i’r tonnau. We are not here. But we are not there either. Together we draft copy for your show. Ponder over the choice of the word “experiences” versus “phenomena.” Whether the phrase “both political and personal” signifies anything at all. To be based in Dinbych, Cymru, or Wales, or Denbigh, or north Wales: these are some questions we ask. Your film—its droning, dreamlike flow and hollowed-out civic setting, almost subterranean but not quite—makes it difficult not to ask and ask some more. Gad i mi beidio gorfodi atebion, mynd gyda’r ddawns. Yours is a film of movement and movements. Its symmetry and its gentleness mask—also point the way to—vast depths of unknowing, uncontrol. The almost-Jarman blue recurs to mark the beginnings and endings of its sequences; we might call them its blues. Do they get darker each time? Don’t tell me. It’s an underworld. It’s all around us. I drink it up. It is blue, like unmade plans, it’s blue like the night that awaits us. Blue like everything we do not know. A place to sink, to collect. The Welsh word for lagoons is morlynnoedd: sea lakes. It is multiplying, it is everywhere, it is too much and not enough. Movements and actions echo. Atalnodi’r delweddau fel y tonnau ar y sgrîn. From deep inside, from under. Sounds reverberate. We are landforms, sediment. Quick to unflatten. Ymgasglaf yr iaith nes bod rhywbeth fel pwrpas yn datgan ei hun. It’s everywhere, it’s blue like everything we do not know. A dance of light and body and blue. Wal fôr. Dylan Huw is an art writer and collaborator living in Caernarfon, Gwynedd, whose work is guided by interests in practices and processes of translation, the documentary, and collective research. His critical writing appears with e-flux, Art Monthly, and Frieze, and he has an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a former Hay Festival Writer at Work (2024), Future Wales Fellow (2022-3), and Jerwood Writer in Residence (2022), and was recently the journal editor for Artes Mundi 10. ​