Holding Pattern: Thinking Through the Work

This month has been quieter on the surface.

Since my last talk in April, I haven’t made much visible progress on the project strands I set out at the start of the year. The data-gathering remains paused, and I have not yet formed the group that will eventually help select artists for Abergavenny Library.

Instead, the focus has shifted inward. Preparing for this month’s talk on Susan Hiller has meant spending time with an artist deeply concerned with belief, collective experience, and what sits just outside official narratives. That feels closely aligned with the questions underpinning this project.

What counts. What is recorded. What is missed.

Alongside this, I’ve been thinking about how cultural expectations shape visibility, particularly around gender. Not in grand or abstract ways, but through everyday patterns. Who organises. Who remembers. Who carries the mental load. Who does the work that goes unseen, and often uncredited.

These are not fixed or universal experiences, but they are familiar enough to feel structural.

I’ve been experimenting with how this might be expressed visually. One idea involves mapped or “painted” routes, where direction is partly chosen and partly imposed. A way of thinking through movement, constraint, and expectation at the same time.

Outside the project, I recently walked 30 miles along the Taff Trail, from Cardiff to Merthyr, revisiting a route I explored last year. Along the way I made a small intervention connected to a previous painting. It felt like a quiet continuation of the same line of enquiry.

For now, the project remains in a holding pattern. Less about output, more about testing ideas and paying attention to what emerges.

My next talk, on Susan Hiller, takes place this Saturday 23 May from 11am to noon at Abergavenny Library.