Three Flanders Landscapes | Tri Thirwedd Fflandrys a/and Three Welsh Landscapes | Tri Thirwedd Cymru

Tri Thirwedd Fflandrys (#7, #8, #9) Tri Thirwedd Cymru (#4, #5, #6)

These altered photographs were inspired by the diary of Corporal John S. Lloyd, an engineer in the British Expeditionary Force. He wrote the diary whilst serving in Flanders, hence the titles, Tri Thirwedd Fflandrys, Tri Thirwedd Cymru.
The diary was first shown to Roger Lougher by Iwan Llwyd after discussions of Llwyd’s play Mae gynnon ni hawl ar y sêr. Llwyd hoped Lougher might find it inspiring. This process has been a slow one and sadly Iwan Llwyd died before he saw the results.
Lougher began photographing the diary over the period of a day. The changing light gave different colours to the paper as the light temperature changed. The words of the diary were then erased from the photographs digitally. Occasionally the artist would leave words or phrases he felt significant. The decision as to which words should be considered significant was as fickle as the changes in light. In these prints the artist has left the names of Welsh towns in Tri Thirwedd Fflandrys, and towns in Flanders in Tri Thirwedd Cymru, (The title, Tri Thirwedd Cymru, refers to the way Lloyd’s letters would have brought the war into the imagination of friends and family at home in Wales, as conversely letters recieved took Wales into Flanders.

Blackwood #4

 

 

Blackwood (close-up)

Nantgarw #5

 

Ynysbwl #6

 

Heuringen #7

St. Omers #8

                                                                

   Wizernes #9

                                                                    


In the face of the horror of the First World War Lougher has chosen a quiet response, one in which the marks left on the page create a blasted landscape; the paper of the page stretched and warped by the act of writing and subsequently of being read. 

The first iteration of ideas inspired by John Lloyd's diary happened during Lougher's residency at Galeri, Caernerfon 2014. Different versions of Tri Thirwedd Fflandrys were exhibited at the Lle Celf, Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Llanelli, 2014


annwfn / unterritory (tirwedd #5 ymlaen / landscape #5)
 
Roger Lougher will use the gallery space to make an installation which in it’s last manifestation on March 14th will then be on show until March 28th.

‘Going to the usual place’ could well be the title for Roger Lougher’s residency, except his work is never what is expected. His art work is an attempt to empathetically retell the experience of his ‘usual’ work felling trees and growing plants in the ‘usual’ place, Drefelin, Carmarthenshire. The re-telling is not a verbal experience but the physical re-enacting of his work activities on trees, logs and branches he has felled and brashed; re-imaging the landscape from which the material has been drawn. This landscape is not only the physical one in which he works, but the internal landscape of memories of work held in his body, fused with musings that arise as he works. Here an obsessive worrying of Cpl. Lloyd’s diary. In this way his physical labour becomes a studio in which the artwork is sketched, rehearsed and practiced. ‘A  Feeling of What Happens” ,as the neurologist Antonio De Massio might say, is the outcome.


The installation in the gallery is a tangential response to the atmosphere of the diary and a celebration of the quiet routines with which we fill our days; it foregrounds the banal routine that is the greater part of warfare rather than the violent drama of conflict. This is Lougher  “doing the usual” working with familiar materials and contemplating ideas about landscape, work and warfare.

In the cafe Lougher has installed table-talkers. These contain a photograph of egg and chips and a diary page from which all the words have been erased apart from “had the usual”, “went to the usual place”, etc. The “usual place” in Flanders were the informal cafés - estaminets - that flourished providing egg and chips to the troops behind the lines and also other more intimate and problematic encounters when they housed brothels.
 
Lougher’s understanding of Annwfn needs explaining. He has a sense that we live in a layered world and if any of these layers delaminate we can suddenly find ourselves in a visually familiar place but one seemingly utterly changed and foreign in it’s feeling. An epiphany held in time by the gallery space.