In his book, Picasso's Mask, Andre Malraux, the French novelist and philosopher, puts forward the idea of a Museum without Walls. The book, a philosophical musing on art as much as a memoir of Picasso, relates the authors experience, summoned by Picasso's widow to select works from his collection of art destined for the Louvre. He remembers incidents of conversation with Picasso as he looks at certain pieces and as he examines the influences that Picasso discovered and appropriated. Malraux also lists the artworks and places in the world that he includes in his own Museum without Walls. He draws from a vast store of cultural influences, "a colliding of centuries", that questions our European Enlightenment ideas of a progressive cultural evolution. From Neo-Sumerian sculpture of 2150 BC in the Louvre to Velasquez' Las Meninas at the Prado, Manet's Olympia to a Mesopotamian fertility symbol. Apollinaire's collection of artifacts in his study to the Romanesque Cathedrals, the freedom from the European constraint of history as seen within African art, the harmony of Hindu art, wonderful pieces of Mesopotamian art. A great deal of this work made by artists unknown, some of whom are;
Those artists who specialised in the sacred and who rather than ignore "nature", subordinated it or scorned it, seemed to be dealing with a super world - a truer, more lasting, and particularly, a more significant world than that of outward appearances.

Works of art like these gave Picasso his ideas, and whether consciously or not, and I suspect the latter, he in turn becomes our bridge to them. The universal artist, a collector of all the world's art, which goes through a process of metamorphoses in his hands, becoming something new. Picasso understood all too well the paradox in this, that these ideas and these themes always were and always would be "new", that all he did was reinvent them for his own time. Seemingly disconnected elements from different periods and different cultures are conjoined, become simultaneous, within an artwork made in an immediate present.

This was so for Picasso, and the book informs us that Rembrandt copied Indian miniatures, Durer carefully examined the Aztec statuettes he was shown in Antwerp, and in varying degrees it is the same for all artists irrespective of their stature. Ideas are raw materials that artists must collect in order to create anew, and it is also clear that the wider community, the state, call it what you will, must collect ideas from its art. Art is not an inanimate commodity, but a repository of information, connections and ideas. A collection of art and ideas in Wales, it follows, should have a specificity to Wales and its people and not be a copy of someone else's collection, for at the end of the day, and the politician needs to understand this, art is a reflection of a nations psyche. That Malraux held a Government position as Secretary for Cultural Affairs indicates that such an understanding can be achieved, albeit on rare occasions, and that (it goes without saying) in France.

Andre Breton, Surrealism's foremost visionary, had a personal collection of objects and art exhibited at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, 28 rooms filled with 530 works.
Combining a powerful nesting instinct with a shaman's power to mediate between images, Breton collected agates and Ernst, Oceanic art and insects, Duchamp and Picasso, the art of the insane and works by his friends who aspired to that condition.

When forced into exile in w.w. 2, Breton encountered New World painters Matta, Arshile Gorky and Wifredo Lam, visited Haiti and rummaged in New York antique shops with Claude Levi Strauss for Zuni artifacts and Hopi Kachina dolls. No ordinary greed impelled Breton to collect. In cultures which recognize the independent life of images, collectors risk "possessions" by the very objects they own. Breton cultivated this risk. He hung paintings near his bed so as to glimpse them, upon waking, by the light of the unconscious. He wrote that he acquired works of art hoping to appropriate as my own certain powers which electively, to my eyes, they harboured.

The Surrealists published a "Map of the world at the time of the Surrealists", which magnified such promised lands as Mexico and Haiti, while erasing the U.S.A. and most of Europe. Breton organized exhibitions that consciously mingled objects from different cultures, native American art alongside paintings by French modernists and juxtaposed Pacific Island objects with works by Man Ray. A single man's property and vision, including collaborations with figures ranging from Dali to Trotsky.

Accordingly, as people of our times of mass information, we are all collectors, even if unconsciously, of artwork from the past and present, and not only of art but ideas and experiences that influences or strikes chords within us. This Museum without Walls truly contains the Wealth of the World in a way that no real museum of bricks and mortar ever could. All they contain is the material manifestations of the artists' collection of influences and ideas. Malraux suggests that we (as artists) do not appropriate this collection, rather that it appropriates us.

The Museum Without Walls is by definition a place of the mind. We don't live in it; it lives in us.

This becomes apparent in the way these ideas and influences crop up in an artists work, it is seldom done directly or consciously. We may become aware of our references some time after the event of its making rather than before or during.

Where, when and how do we begin collecting? For all of us, it is dependent on the situation we find ourselves in and also by the person we are, by the background we come from and by the influences and experiences that continue to shape and modify us. As the (Welsh) theoretician Raymond Williams said;

"I think that every artist who reflects on his experience and development becomes deeply aware of the extent to which these factors of formation and alignment in his own very specific history have been decisive to a sense of what he is and what he is then free to do"

These formative influences, and the experiences and ideas that follow from them are the raw materials that the artist collects and out of them fashions new things, the end product sifted out of the collected items in the museum of the mind.

I live in Grangetown, the river Taff passes close by on its last lurch to the sea, within sight is the new Rugby Millennium Stadium, ten minutes walk brings you to the site of the new Assembly building. Of my forty three years, half have been spent in Cardiff. In the shop on the corner, the young men converse in Urdu. The children who play in the street wear saris, the games they play are western ones. My wife was born in Cardiff, but her family is from Greece. Our children speak Welsh. I am, in John Cowper Powys' words, an "obstinate Cymric" from the north, living as far south as you can possibly get in Wales, a minority amongst minorities, all of us constituent parts of today's Wales.

Like Mr Khan who lives two doors down, I know the people that came before me. On a Sunday, my parents, a 150 miles north have just come home from chapel, something both have done for seventy years and more. They will sit to watch a Welsh language programme on S4C, they will phone us to inquire about the children, they will go to my sisters house in the same street. Their lives are lived through the medium of the Welsh language, and are centred around a particular Welsh culture, and so it has been for generations. Village affairs, chapel affairs, family affairs, the interconnectedness of people; an almost tribal existence that is, with my generation, irrevocably and unavoidably changing totally. This "core" identity is being undermined by a more "global" culture. It never seemed necessary for my father to define his identity, I seem to be doing it constantly. The older I get, the more these formative influences impinge on my imagination. My consciousness of "passing things on" perhaps awakened by having three children of my own.

I first left home in Bala to attend University in Aberystwyth to study at the Faculty of Economics ( which I was eminently unsuited to) and Social Studies, before following my preferred path in art a year later doing a Foundation course in Chester. At Aberystwyth I lived in a completely Welsh speaking, highly politicised student hall of residence, a ferment of political and cultural activity, a place where the language and its culture was central to everything. To come to art college in Cardiff was a total antithesis. There was hardly another Welsh speaker at the college, the tutors were skeptic or unaware that in Wales there was a separate culture, and more than that, the art colleges of the time (1973) were embroiled in the concerns of late modernism, particularly American inspired "internationalism". To be interested in, or involved in the specifics of a small culture was not considered a valid activity. I parted company with the course in the second year.

For me, a collection of influences started with an eclectic selection of well known artists from the Western canon, as well as a smattering of Welsh artists, or any who could conceivably be connected to Wales. Augustus John, as much for his links to Bala where I lived, for his romantic bohemianism, his peculiar self destructiveness as for his draughtsmanship. Gaudier-Brzeska, a great modernist killed in the trenches, who had lived in Claude Road, Cardiff for a short while, a street that I lived in as a student. Chagall, Roualt, Dubuffet, later Miro and Tapies from Catalunia. Philip Guston's late cartoon inspired figuration, John Bellany's Scottish expressionism, later still; Joseph Beuys and unavoidably, constantly if not consciously; Picasso. As a sculpture student in Cardiff I was interested in the work of minimalist American sculptors like Carl Andre and Richard Nonas. Many years later, I was surprised to meet Nonas in Cardiff, at the Site-ations 94 event hosted by The Artists' Project. We talked a great deal about Welsh history, in particular the Madog myth, and following these conversations, research I suppose, he chose Mandan, the name of the so-called Welsh speaking Indians from the story, as a title for his piece in the event. Brancusi predating and influencing both. I remember seeing Rodin's Museum in Paris and the paintings of Munch on a school trip to London. Other influences came from naive or folk artists' work which I first encountered in art galleries on a visit to the Mid West of the USA in 1980 to visit family in Iowa and Wyoming. (They had emigrated there in 1911, a Welsh Diaspora still closely linked through family, to the "old country"). This developed into a wider interest in the untutored and intuitive, in "outsider" art and in the art of children. My appreciation of all these artists' work was not on a formal basis, rather an intuitive one. They inspired in me what I can only describe as a consuming desire to be a participant rather than an onlooker.

Most of the knowledge garnered on these artists came from personal study and mainly from books. Like many artists, I became an autodidact. Very little had been taught about Welsh art or artists in school, even less at art college. The belief was that any self respecting artist from Wales had buggered off to London long ago, and had then somehow become English. Artists, and not only art, need to be collected into the consciousness of a nation, and then we might have seen, not the barren landscape we imagined but the reality of a country where many artists were, and had been consistently working. The fault lay in a lack of writing on art in Wales as much as the colonialist denigration of native talents, which ensured that art and artists were never "collected" into the cultural discourse in Wales, they did not become part of "y Pethe", the things of concern. As Peter Lord, who's "The Aesthetics of Relevance", one was one of the first books to highlight this issue as recently as 1992, says;
Absence of proof is no proof of absence.
Opportunities for viewing art were also rare, though my parents had always encouraged educational jaunts to great cathedrals and castles and occasionally to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. Luckily, there was an inspirational art teacher at school in Bala in the form of Glyn Baines, but we lacked that sense of our own art history (otherwise Ceri Richards might have been a more important formative influence, he should have been). As it was, in my early twenties, I discovered the work of David Jones through his own writing; "In Parenthesis" and "The Anathemata", and then through links with Capel y Ffin where he had lived and worked alongside Eric Gill . I was drawn to David Jones because his imagination was trained on the same things that interested me, Wales, the Matter of Britain, mythology, the layers of meaning, memory and make-believe within the artists' mind and out there somewhere, connecting us to the roots of a collective unconsciousness in this landscape. He had immersed himself in the cultural heritage of Romano- Celtic Britain, a historic and part mythic period that has fundamental bearing on Welsh history and myth, and on our relationship to the rest of the British Isles to this day. This was an art of ideas coming from his own collection of read and imagined historic concepts, not just an art of representation. Like David Jones, I also found source material in The Mabinogi and formed my own collection from its fertile fantasia . From the late 70's onwards, I worked on paintings and drawings that attempted to make contemporary currency out of the myths and fables of another age. Lleu, Blodeuwedd and Bran. A series of paintings in the mid 80's called Llongau Madog (Madog's Ships), were based on the legend of the landing in the America's by Prince Madog of Gwynedd in the twelfth century. Their aim was to make comment on rural depopulation, of moving or being pushed off the land, the decline of a way of life in the search for the "new". A large drawing, Cwch Ymadael, from this series is now in the collection of Y Tabernacl, The Museum of Modern Art, Wales.

I believe I learnt more in practical terms from my contemporaries at college than I did from the course itself, and then by meeting and exhibiting alongside more established artists, painters like Tony Goble who shared my interest in the elements of "fantasy" that inform the day to day.... and being Welsh. I also gained a lot through acquaintance with writers and poets like Twm Miall, Iwan Llwyd and later, the playwright Ed Thomas, with whom I collaborated on Flowers of the Dead Red Sea in 1991 and Hiraeth in 1993.

In 1985 I was invited to joined Grwp Beca, established by Paul and Peter Davies a decade before, (and later joined by Ivor Davies and Dennis Bowen), to make art that articulated that politicised Welsh awareness that I had come across in Aberystwyth, and in Bala before that. Beca took its name from the Rebecca Rising of 1843, a violent reaction to the collecting of tolls on the highways in Wales, and of the general injustices of a colonial regime. The men incidentally dressed in disguise as women for these raids, faces blacked up, which earned them the title, "hosts of Rebecca". But it is to a more recent event of colonialism that we must look for the sparking off of the politicisation of the 1960's and 70's, an event much depicted in the artwork of Beca members, notably in a painting by Ivor Davies of 1993 and an installation piece by Tim Davies of 1997.

The event, in 1963, was the drowning of the village and valley of Capel Celyn near Bala by Liverpool Corporation. An act of colonial imposition, ignoring the wishes of the Welsh population, to provide water for the conurbation across the border. The village and surrounding farms were evacuated and the Tryweryn river dammed. Though only one of many reservoirs built in Wales since the Victorians, this spawned outrage and organised protests that escalated both into constructive peaceful movements like the Welsh Language Society, and into potentially violent resistance by the Free Wales Army, M.A.C and later to the burning of English holiday cottages by Meibion Glyndwr. In 1969, the year of the Investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales, John Jenkins, formerly a British army officer, was charged with a variety of offences involving explosives, and was sentenced to ten years imprisonment where he suffered much intimidation. The flooding of Tryweryn, though I have only a child's memory of it, had added poignancy for me as a child of the area, friends at school were direct victims of the upheaval caused. It would seem also that this "drowning" is a contemporary event that strikes a chord in the collective memory. It has resonance for anyone who has read early Welsh poetry and myth, which attaches great relevance to magical lakes and the other world that lies beneath their surface, to the drowning of land, as in Cantre'r Gwaelod and in the story of Llyn Tegid in Bala, the other lake that I grew up with as a child.

Grwp Beca proved that we as artists could legitimately address issues of our Welshness in our work. It proved also that social circumstances throw up artists with the necessary imagination and cultural consciousness to address issues that are to do with identity and its complex and ambiguous nature, to challenge the confusing factors and antagonisms of their times. The artists involved also brought with them a language of formal innovation. Working collaboratively, working with debris, mud and refuse on his Maps of Wales, writing and lecturing, Paul Davies was an inspirational force in contemporary Welsh art before his untimely death in 1993, aged 46. He believed that art could change things. He left a fine collection of ideas for those who follow him, and a body of work that should one day form the core of a collection of indigenous art in a (state funded) Welsh Museum of Modern Art.

Ivor Davies figured significantly in the Destruction in Art movement of the 1960's in London and Edinburgh, organising performances that involved controlled explosions, self destructing assemblages, a stage act. These influences filtered into the processes of Beca's working methods, and for me, became first hand contact with the idealism and dynamics of the 1960's art world. He may now be content with the medium of paint (and red coloured earth pigments from Eppynt) on canvas, but still destroys, erases with drill and sanding disc, rubs out within the process of making images.

Art as the expression of a people.

A visit to the Basque country in 1989 proved a revelation, there I saw the work of Augustin Ibarrola, an unfamiliar name over here, but respected as an "elder" artist in Euskadi, an artist who had the stature of a national institution, his work inexorably tied to a national consciousness. Painted sculptures made from welded steel and railway sleepers, are located in public spaces, graphic painting installations evoking workers solidarity, Basque independence of spirit, imbued with authenticity, hang in galleries. In a pine forest near his studio and home on the outskirts of Guernica are the ghostly presence of his primitive painted silhouettes of marching men and watchful totemic eyes. Spindly ladders made from the branches of these straight growing pines are left leaning against the trees where the artist used them, signifying paradoxically, both presence and absence. Whilst we walked the paths through this vast forest shouting through cupped hands; "Ibarrola", "Ibarrola" (his wife had informed us he was working up there), he vanished from sight. It all reminded me of the surmised ancestry of my own people, as pre- Celtic Iberians, who vanished into the mountains and forests to emerge again and again through history, avoiding successive waves of conquerors, from the blonde Celts, to the Romans, Vikings, Saxons, Normans. Was this why we seemed to have an affinity with the non Celtic Basques, whose origins and language are a mystery?. Many years later I learnt from the American critic Robert C. Morgan that painted trees were a phenomenon that occurred wherever there were Basque settlements in the U.S. The work of Ibarrola seemed, along with the clandestine, satirical and inventive political art that proliferated on the walls of Pamplona and Bilbao, to be a national expression. Seeing the work was like knowing the people, a feeling that this art accurately reflected the expression of this nation, that it was connected to its community. I duly collected that idea into my Museum without Walls.

My bookshelves at home are full of catalogues, magazines and books that deal with these issues in the art of other countries, if not my own. This quote, randomly selected, comes from a catalogue of New Croatian Art touring South America, Prof Mimi Marinovic of the University of Chile says;

Culture makes the nation. The arts are part of a single symbolic expressive logic that is in the closest possible connection with the identity of a nation.... The critical, self-critical consciousness of the artist who deserves the name contributes to the giving shape to identity. It is capable of opposing the challenge of foreign and universal models of rhetoric, so characteristic of our age in which reciprocal communications are constantly on the rise. It creatively alters these models or, in contact with them, creates new views of tradition, thus enriching them.

Art and the spirit.

In 1990, I spent four months as Artist in Residence at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. During my stay in that country, I experienced what can only describe as the spiritual elements of creativity, gazing at the dry stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe and seeing the San bush men's rock paintings in the arid landscape, some dating back two thousand years, all made with a sure hand gesture in fragile pigment, yet still there. In the best of the contemporary stone sculpture, that of Bernard Matamera, (with whom I shared many a meal and conversation while living and working at Tengenege sculpture village in the bush north of Harare), of Nicholas Mukomberanwa , the brothers Takawira and the younger Tapfuma Gutsa, there was a spirit presence that had long since deserted western sculpture. For the first time I began to appreciate the gravitas, that presence inherent in great works of art, something that was simply there like a force of nature. In formal terms, this sculpture shares a common language with Brancusi, Epstein and Moore, yet it is rooted in Shona consciousness; in religion, myth and culture.

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For two years after Africa, my work dealt with the sense of dislocation that I felt on my return from Zimbabwe to Cardiff. I felt as if I was living in limbo, between two worlds. Paradoxically I had felt "at home" in Zimbabwe, and somehow not "at home" on my return, restless, dissatisfied. I completed a series of images that were in effect, deliberate palimpsests, several layers of drawing, painting and mixed media collage, superimposed by a final layer of drawing done with oil paint on the inside of the glass fronting the work, separated by a gap. The sense of limbo created by two incomplete world's of experience was there in the small gap between the drawings. This work was exhibited as Hiraeth at Oriel, Cardiff and on a subsequent tour in 1993/94. One of these paintings Raise High your Ruins was recently purchased for The National Museum and Gallery of Wales by the Derek Turner Bequest; it takes its imagery from the central stone tower of Great Zimbabwe, whose purpose and history is lost to us, yet which in 1980, became a symbol for the new state of Zimbabwe.

The exhibition, Hiraeth, also formed part of my final presentation for a Masters Degree done at Howard Gardens, Cardiff, a personal vindication after my unhappy first encounter with the college. As a by product of my studies, I began to enjoy writing and reading on a much more varied range of topics. Ideas were collected in earnest. However, the main enquiry remained my concern with connecting my interest in Welsh identity with a deepening awareness of the post colonial critique that was appearing in an increasing amount of writing (its impetus coming from artists in Africa and Latin America), and the way that postmodernism seemed to be opening avenues for art that dealt with these issues. It no longer seemed necessary to propagate the "internationalism" that late modernism had demanded. An "internationalism", that was in fact an intellectual ideology based on a very narrow and Euro-American view of the world. I became engrossed in a world of theory which only became focused through cross referencing Post-modern theories with those two Welsh cultural polymaths, (who became my intellectual touchstones); Raymond Williams and Gwyn Alf Williams, into a context that would serve an artist in Wales.

At about the same time however I was becoming more involved with international artists and events working with the Artists' Project/Prosiect Artistiaid in Cardiff. This artist run organisation which, along with Sean O'Reilly and Paul Beauchamp, I helped initiate in 1992, brought contact with international artists and ideas closer to home. Affiliation with the Artists' Museum in Lodz, Poland, joined us to a network of artist run "offices", an "international provisional artists' community". I quote from their own description;

The International Artists' Museum is no walled in museum. It is a worldwide channel of communication linking artists and intellectuals from a variety of domains through a growing global network of autonomous, locally run art centres, interactive but funded independently.

Events ( site-specific multimedia work made over seven to fourteen days) were hosted by The Artists' Project in Cardiff, notably Site-ations in 1994 and 1996. The Project invited artists from Wales to participated in events abroad, in Berlin, the Negev desert, Poland and Croatia, thus enlarging our community and our own experience as artists. A memory that stays in my mind is of the artist Ryszard Wasko, founder of the Artists' Museum, typing out a letter formally welcoming us to the fraternity, on a battered old portable, cigar in mouth, glass of vodka at hand, on a cold and dreary day in Lodz. I learned of his Archive of Contemporary Thought which preceded the Artists' Museum, set up in a spare back room of his flat; a collection of documents, plans and ideas, sent by artists from all over the world, for artworks to be donated to Poland in the days of Solidarity. This illustrated an alternative means of collecting to the traditional museum practice, indeed it questions the role of those institutions by creating a collection based on artists' ideas, to be shared within a global community structured on shared values. Values such as these had been initiated by artists like Kandinski, Alfred Kupka, Sol Le Witt, John Cage, Alexander Calder, Joseph Beuys and movements such as Constructivism in Eastern Europe and Fluxus in the US.

The Artists' Project's wish, an ambitious one, would be to make Wales a centre where these ideas of art are involved in the process of self-definition, not only for and in Wales, but as a model for the rest of Europe. That rather than being way behind we could be way ahead. Whereas we artists have the imagination to cope with that concept, the funding bodies unfortunately might not. Will they "buy" the idea, will they be collectors?.

I might, with this opportunity, have entertained a life of nomadism like these "international" artists, who travelled from event to event, but, by now a married man with a young family, I had become more aware of "home" and more tied to it through the responsibilities of parenthood. If it had ever been an abstract concept, it was now most definitely a real one. This situation seems to make reflection on the ongoing parallel, and at times contradictory concepts of globalization and roots, the world and the home, inevitable.

Researching into these apparent inconsistencies led to an increasing interest in the work of artists from other cultures in the developing world who might have more in common with my own point of view here in Wales. These were artists who we might say, deal with the relevance of the concept of home, of roots, within the wider world. Art that tended to reject the formal skills and technique once avidly taught by the west, to delve more effectively into unconscious language, coupled with a conscious grappling with the issues of post-colonial identity, with the political and socio-historic, appealed to me.

I was drawn in particular to the work of the Cuban artist, Jose Bedia. His stark, yet telling drawing and installation work (seen only in reproduction) immediately introduces a view of culture from a different perspective. He views Cuba as a syncretic culture, a human crossroads of cultural references. Bold figures evoking African deities and spirits leap mountains and cross bridges, dragging boats, trains and trucks into the new world of North America. He explores the notion of trans- nationalism. Culture that is not isolated or drowned by incursions from elsewhere, but which transforms itself through appropriation and absorption. Even in reproduction, his installations and canvases exude a certain aura, almost a religious significance through it's symbolism. It was only recently, on a visit to Cuba in 1998, that I gained a better understanding of this subject. As one of the "unofficial" artists, a generation who emerged in Cuba in the eighties, he no longer lives there, ( I was contacted recently by one of his contemporaries, Raol Speek, who has lived in Solva, Pembrokeshire for the last three years) yet I discovered the strong roots of his and several other artists' work in the Afro/Cuban Santeria tradition. I found that as a practitioner of the Palo Monte religion, Bedia's work quite often incorporated elements of magical and ritualistic significance within them. Another artist, Juan Fransisco Elso (1956-88), in his effigy/image; Por America (1986), a carved wooden figure of Jose Marti, Cuban national hero, intellectual and writer, is "Charged" with a coating of mud mixed with the artists own blood and that of his wife's, the Mexican artist Magali Lara. Other pieces are "charged" with elements that give them power; a stone from the Andes, a conch shell from Africa, soil from various places, seeds. There is in this work an added dimension to the visual, formal aesthetic. The work seems driven by a hidden meaning. On study it becomes clear that these artists, some of whom are initiates into Santeria in one or other of it's many guises, actually employed magical distillations of herb's and roots hidden within the work. Bedia distinguishes a real, working altar which he had made and ritually sanctified with chicken blood in his studio, and a "clean" copy of it commissioned by a North American gallery.

These artists' work ceases to be mere illustrations of ideas and become potent, transformative "altars". One common factor in a sometimes loosely connected generation of artists from Cuba is the required research that all have done, consciously or unconsciously in ethnography. They have, in varying degrees, learnt about the practice of Santeria, though many were born into it, and the symbolism and history of that Yoruba past and continuing tradition in Latin America. Bedia says that his interest in the religion was "First of all as a recognition of my national identity and a search for strong roots in Cuban life that would explain things about Cuba". Bedia's research was an anthropological discovery of the Cuban people, his community. Lydia Cabrera's study of the culture of African descendants in Cuba, begun in the 1930's has had considerable influence. Bedia's research also included the culture of the indigenous Amerindian culture, one that could also be said to be symbolically and materially syncretised into his work as it is into contemporary Cuba. This interest in indigenous culture led to a residency with the Dakota Sioux in 1985. There is a vast store of collected knowledge informing his formally quite stark installations and drawings.

Some of the artists, like Bedia, have become initiates, whilst others remain secular but aware of the magic they can tap into for their work. Raquelin Mendieta, tellingly talks of her own work thus;
" Spirituality and art are one and the same.
Works of art are prayers on the altar of life".

All artists must feel at some time or other, that their art seems not to come directly from them, it is either attributed to "luck" or "accident", "fortune" or "inspiration". To face an empty white canvas or a block of wood or stone, alone and with no ideas, is a daunting experience. Sculptors in Zimbabwe believe the final form is already within the stone, their job is only to release this "Mashave", this wandering spirit trapped inside. In the case of the Cuban artists, a particular order of acknowledgment is given to the "orishas", the messengers who commune with the one god, Olodumare. This is the reason Bedia had a working altar, venerating a particular "Orisha"connected with creativity, in his studio. I am almost tempted to suggest that artists in Wales should begin to acknowledge the influence and inspiration of Taliesin and Ceridwen as guiding spirits, and have altars to these beneficent deities in the corner of the studio somewhere.

Taking inspiration from the symbology of other cultures has its problems. Jose Bedia gains status and value as an international artist through manipulating the signs of Lakota (Amerindian) ledger book drawings, Afro-Cuban palo monte or Australian Aboriginal dot paintings in a way that a Lakota or Afro-Cuban or Australian artist cannot - at least not without being labelled "ethnic" rather than international.

It is worth bearing in mind the view held by artist and writer Santo De Monte (when reviewing the work of Dutch artist Hans Rikken)...

What we find fascinating in an alien culture may be an unconscious projection of something latent or submerged in one's own. We might, for instance, rethink Picasso's manipulation of African aesthetics as a detour "back" to an archaic Iberian past - he had, after all, been witness to the discovery of Iberian sculpture in the early 1900's.
The northern European sensibility has never wholly relinquished its attachments to a paganism whose divinities were deeply implicated in nature.

If Rikken taps into the natural, elemental components of Afro-Cuban culture, it may well derive from a similar perhaps unconscious nostalgia for a European "primitivism" or mythic past. The mute Cuban influence enables the northerner to rediscover or rearticulate his own selfhood.

We must always be aware of the degree of our influence by other symbologies. For me, the work of these artists served more as a validation of a cause, this "custodial aesthetic" which allowed me to reinvent an iconography using components, fragments of traditions, tropes, cliche's, myths, stories from my own culture.

My paintings, assemblages, wall pieces, these manifestations of ideas are, like most artists work; personal statements. More importantly, they are about a community that I feel I belong to. This community is formed by what Raymond Williams called "structures of feeling", by shared assumptions and a common bank of memory and culture. I therefore feel an affinity to those artists who make work in similar circumstances and with similar structures of feelings elsewhere in the world.

What does heritage have to do with my art? is a rhetorical question asked by North American Indian artist Kay Walking Stick, it is who I am. Art is a portrait of the artist, at least of the artist's thought processes, sense of self, sense of place in the world. If you see art as that, then my identity as an Indian artist is crucial.

My community encompasses those who share a sense of artistic purpose. Those whose art is more than art for art's sake, who use art as a language (which it is), as a language should be used. That is, as a medium to say things. A medium for message and memory. Art therefore with content and relevance to those communities they belong to, or at least about them. This should not confine the work to its own community however, unlike a spoken language, visual art need have no borders, such work is accessible to a wider audience. As David Alston, former Keeper of Art at the National Museum and Galleries of Wales says in his essay for the book "Certain Welsh Artists";

It appears to me that in matters of style and content in present day Wales an artist can now work both indigenously and internationally.

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I came to realise that what I enjoyed most, and had the best facility for, was not purely "painting" in the real sense of the word but drawing. Making marks to impart a message in a very basic and direct way, though the message itself remains complex. Immediacy bred from impatience, gestural lines with a spontaneous yet controlled calligraphic signature rather than any great skill as a technician would be my stock in trade although this is a technique in itself). My interest was not for tonalities, subtleties and hues or purely formal relationships with material and technique, certainly not with any decorative effects. I began to see much so called serious art as little more than surface decoration, whilst a great deal of what is thought of as art by the general public is really more to do with skill in conjuring with paint, a craft in my mind and not art at all. This is not to suggest that craft is a lesser thing, but it is a different thing.

There is always an assumption that drawing is a preparatory act, preparatory to painting. Yet drawing can be seen as an end result in itself. I see my way of working as being a mixture of both drawing and painting, or rather that I am drawing with paint. The definition between drawing and painting is always a shifting and subjective one, but some artists' work can be seen to be about "paint" in a very definite way, whereas for me, it's more about materials that make marks efficiently, and have a certain logic within the context of the work. Charcoal and pastel are beautiful to use on raw canvas, emulsions are fast, quick drying, liquid. Oils have their own life, they invest a "finish", they seem to lead you more into the work. I feel that I work in collaboration with oil-paints, rather than employing them. I use a mixture of materials at the same time, often as they come to hand in the studio.

I usually begin with charcoal, chalks and pastels, they are primal, earthy mark making mediums. Paradoxically, these elements, ephemeral and unstable as they are, have left their traces in the rock "paintings" of the San of Southern Africa for two thousand years. Like human life itself, they always leave a stain, a trace, a residue, a memory. Quite often the painting begins as a means of erasure, some areas of pastel or charcoal that are mistakes are "Tippexed" out. Intuition then leads the way, accidents become guidelines for developing in a new direction. Then colour is added for emphasis, or for symbolic reasons. The canvas sometimes seems to cry out for a dash of red which I usually draw on, using the paint tube much like a felt-pen, or splashing a streak of wet emulsion across. I still think of this as drawing; mark-making to impart a message rather than an involvement with colour tonalities or with purely formal and technical relationships with material. The process of making the work becomes ritualistic, a transformation of material into a language of archetypal symbols.

With the series of pastel and charcoal drawings on unprimed canvas, collectively called Panorama (Edge of Land), 1995-96, I created drawings, imagined landscapes that yet bore resemblance to real places, that would work both individually and in a series of multiples, in a block. I made a repetitious statement using a language of symbols that originated in my own cultural background, or that has particular resonance in that culture. The series was exhibited in various large scale drawing installations which could also be broken up into its component parts, to sell (which it has proved to do), or to be reassembled in a different order. Thus, the installation was slowly distributed far and wide, in Wales and beyond. I imagine these as fragments, "cultural artefacts" rather than simply framed drawings. They had to carry something exterior to themselves and they would have to be "of" as much as "about" the culture so that they could convey historical depth and, possibly even a spiritual dimension.

For the Welsh, the landscape has never been isolated from the story or history attached to it. Place names often allude to stories from the Mabinogi, to historic or mythic events. Features in the landscape are animated by narrative. Over centuries, recognisable repetitions of meaningful events occur in literature. The image of the drowning or flooding of pasture land and settlements, as I have mentioned earlier, is one of these; events generally attached in folk memory to places you can visit today. This metaphor of the drowned land, church bells silenced by the sea, seems particularly apt for a culture continuously threatened with suffocation by alien incursions over the last millennium. There are examples in early Welsh poetry of a wish to see the land of Wales consumed by the sea rather than for it to suffer the ignominy of English rule. Not such a bad option if we remember that the Celtic paradise, land of the ever young, was not in the sky above, but beneath the waves. The "drowned land" and the "muffled bells" story however, signifies more than the mere loss of land - the land and the culture are inseparable - therefore what is being submerged here is the soul of a people and the silencing of a language.

The "imagined landscape" of Panorama (Edge of Land), refers to this culture. The blue of the rising water could be the blue of the Union Flag that has so infected our political thinking. The rows of uniform houses conveys the heedless population. these are not the picturesque landscapes, not the tourist view of Wales, this is the land with it's history and myths attached to it. An attempt is made to link the viewer to something beyond the visual, strange yet familiar, the forms could be recognised in the mountains around Blaenau Ffestiniog, on the Llyn Peninsula and in the Brecon Beacons. This landscape always bears an uncanny resemblance to a pregnant woman. When I began this series, my wife Sophie was a month away from giving birth to our son Elis, very much "the wealth of my world". With other works like Self in a Bearing Land (1995), Gwales (Ararat) (1997), Haunted by ancient gods (Figure in a Landscape) (1997) and Land-mine (1998) this graphic display of the feminine aspect of nature's creativity, poetically and mythically linked to the landscape and matter of Wales, is made even clearer. It is also the place where conflict and negotiation, compromise and conciliation takes place with the warrior gods, the man-made phallic structures, towers built, stone upon stone, the building blocks of "culture", not made of nature but placed upon her. Poetic Romanticism on the one hand, Marxist Materialism on the other. This is the "land of my fathers", yet deep down it is the "Mother country", "y Famwlad".

I have adapted, reused, "shape-shifted" this symbolically loaded landscape because it refers perhaps to the hopes we have, fuelled by desire, for the birth of a brighter future, or in the ancient tradition, of rebirth. "Daw eto haul ar fryn". I have narrowed down much of my visual language to the point where it approaches the archetypal, both timeless fertility symbol and schoolboy graffiti, a schematic repetition. The landscape drawings became larger and incorporated more mixed media techniques, oil paint returned to the fore alongside charcoal, pastel and emulsions on large unprimed hanging canvases (shown in the Artists' Project exhibition Borders at the Museum of Modern Art in Zagreb and at Howard Gardens Gallery in Cardiff in 1997.

Another deity materialises in this series of works titled Haunted by ancient gods. Twin faced Janus floats above the landscape, signifying a view to the past and to the future simultaneously. This was the series of paintings that won the Gold Medal for Fine Art at the National Eisteddfod of Wales in 1997, with great appropriateness, in Bala. That presence continued, aptly enough, into the self explanatory series Flags for the Assembly (1998) and to the new work that heralds the new millennium, Offerings and Reinventions (1999). The twin faced Romano Celtic deity Janus floats above the landscape and it's inhabitants, signified again by the rows of stylised houses whose existence is in effect, haunted by an underlying mythical dimension, though a partly forgotten one. The gods (shape-shifted by the early Christian church and again by Calvinistic Methodism and non conformity, by "old Iolo" and his druidic reiventions, by utopian new Worldism, and so on to the present day, are the ancient Cymric gods, traces of whom remain in the collected tales of The Mabinogi, transformed into heroic mortals. Their supernatural origins betrayed by their extraordinary prowess and ability.

This recent work, exemplified by the Gwalia Reinvented series of thematic variations, is an attempt at reinventing outdated icons of cultural identity, believing the historian, the late Professor Gwyn Alf Williams' axiom that Wales' history is that of Rupture and Reinvention. Janus, gazes at the past and future simultaneously, scrutinises the past to prevent it's closures from stifling the discourse of the future. Janus that gave its name to January, first month of a new year and in our case, a new century and new millennium, with Wales for the first time in 500 years having an element of political self determination. The woman in the Welsh costume, so often in the past a symbol of placid and unthreatening domesticity is restored to a role of mother-goddess, giving birth to a future that is, for this parent of three children, a hopeful if uncertain one.

The Janus figure is significant in that it symbolises a position where both past and future are being scrutinised to provide relevance to the present. This is not simply an attempt to recreate a historic or mythic past, but an attempt to capture the past's continuing psychological importance for the present.

At the National Eisteddod of Wales, Bro Ogwr in 1998, I exhibited a wall-piece, an assemblage made of salvaged timber, small drawings, Welsh lady figurines found at car boot sales and a drawing of twin-faced Janus in chalk on slate occupying the central location. Mounted on the wall it resembled a mantel piece, drawing reference from the central location and importance that construct had for the traditional family. I equated the mantel piece with a sort of domestic altar piece, furnished with its offerings; valued objects and family portraits, a form of ancestor worship perhaps. With the addition of a red canvas "apron" where the fire would be, it began to resemble the costume of those eponymous "Welsh ladies". I called it Truly imagined (the Welsh costume), signifying perhaps, the imagined nature of our identity as much as the partly imagined costume. It was a popular piece, well received by an audience who saw in it the humour and the relevance. Whilst being recorded by photographer Marian Delyth, two ladies, ceremoniously dressed in the costume were persuaded to stand alongside it, bringing the piece into a formal and conceptual full circle. This work became the starting point of a new series of three dimensional wall-pieces, incorporating iconic drawn and painted images with carefully selected ephemera from car boot sales. Perhaps these tacky Welsh lady ornaments could be raised to the level of Catholic Madonna's in Cuban altar pieces.

The overflowing of graphic work, text and drawing on paper or canvas, beyond the conventions of the media leads naturally to installation. This provides the works ambience, articulated with objects, texts and other more traditional resources common to the practice of installation, though I am less drawn to European Installation art than its Caribbean and Latin American counterpart which is geared more obviously towards the social, the cultural and political, and which is in a sense, closer connected to the real through a continuous process of installation making, of the Church and of the domestic altar pieces of the region. In my own assemblages, many of the symbols that had been used sequentially over the years reappear in three dimension, real ladders support mantle shelves, in Rupture and Reinvention the shelf is boat shaped, small drawings on canvas are placed on the wall surrounding the central piece, which is a variation on the theme Gwalia Reinvented. Another in that series is placed icon like to hang above an altar/shelf that is a mantle-piece and also a bridge reached by a ladder in Ysgol/Capel. The Welsh title gives a clue to the symbolism, where school and ladder in Welsh share the name "Ysgol", therefore signifying an ascending process of learning and endeavour. "Capel", chapel, refers to the austere nature of this work, as opposed to the more elaborate, ornamentation of the dresser like piece, Field-notes for a Native Land. This latter piece developed from the notion voiced by critic and theorist James T Clifford when he says;

Perhaps there is no return for anyone to his native land, only field notes for it's reinvention.
I felt that, in a sense, we are all becoming more and more distanced from our native land, even whilst living on the same soil. I salvaged a packing case, once belonging to the National Museum of Wales, as a receptacle for an imagined transporting or preserving, having it then exhibited as a piece of furniture akin to a dresser, with the artworks it might have contained being "field-notes", then displayed on or around it, much in the way a real Welsh dresser is used today, more ornamental than functional, a domestic museum piece containing and displaying a collection of family heirlooms.

This above quotation also brings me around to my other activity, that of writing. The collecting of ideas comes from many sources, and as I have suggested, includes reading, and though the situation is improving we are still short of written material on art in Wales. As an intervention into this area, my collected ideas formed themselves into the theory, expressed earlier, of a Custodial Aesthetic, which in turn led me to introduce and compile a collection of essays devoted to Certain Welsh Artists, those who I consider to be involved with these Custodial Aesthetics.

Custodial Aesthetics explains a position taken, whereby the artists' work, knowingly or subliminally, draws on the specifics of Welsh culture either as a full scale politicised or social commentary on identity today, or by the influence of locality and background, in other words; formation. Raymond Williams, as we have seen, developed the theory based on Formation and Alignment mentioned at the beginning of this paper. To follow Williams' theory, we might say that it is "alignment" with the elements of "formation" that makes the work of these artists interesting. Custodial Aesthetics could more easily be translated into the Welsh "Cof Cenedl", which might invoke "tribal memory" or "memory of a collective people". The discourse contained in the book pivots around the meaning and interpretation of these words.

For my part, and I hope that the introduction to the book substantiates this, custodial aesthetics is not a branch of the heritage industry, not a preservation of things past but a living thing. As in "Cof Cenedl", it is a long piece of string to which we are attached, and are components of, (i.e., we are the string at this point in time) going onwards into the future. As the poet Gerallt Lloyd Owen has said:

"a fu ddoe a fydd o hyd" (what existed once, will always exist).