Date/Time
Date(s) - 03/05/2014 - 07/06/2014
All Day
Location
Clwyd Theatre Cymru
Categories No Categories
IWAN BALA: WORDS
From an early age Iwan Bala was encouraged to read – his father had a large collection of books; treasured gifts at Christmas were books. He would spend hours immersed in literature both English and Welsh. These imaginary worlds that he entered often translated into drawings and texts that he himself created. Imagined countries, imagined histories. Since his father’s death in 2011, he revisited his father’s bookshelves to empty them, and came across many underlined passages in books of Welsh poetry and hymns, with notes inserted in relevant pages.
These Welsh words to him signified the passing of a literate generation, and of the appreciation of ‘Words’. The fact that these are mostly in Welsh is also significant, because despite all effort, the language is in decline. These ‘Words’ therefore signify loss, and a Hiraeth that is embedded in them.
Meaning becomes less important than creating a visual image out of the words, making them ‘visible’. He likes to know that these words of Welsh are exhibited in places as diverse asChina,QatarandAustralia, as if somehow he needs to make visible the material of the language he was born with.
Even as fewer and fewer people are able to read them as text, they can still be read as ‘image’. But to those who can also read the words, they contain the emotional power that they had when sung in chapel on Sundays, or read by the fireside on a winter’s night.
– See more at: http://www.clwyd-theatr-cymru.co.uk/en/whats_on/event/32162#sthash.mlfLWqQ5.dpuf
