Exhibitions

 Woven Memories is about the seafaring ethos of Ceredigion coastal communities. Aberarth, near Aberaeron, where I live had a long history of ship building in the early 1800’s.  This was a time when people built houses from beach pebbles and positioned them with their backs to the sea as a defence against the weather. During this period ships were the main form of transport for trading for coastal communities. Yet it was often a very dangerous occupation for mariners, having to cope with storms and unpredictable weather relying mainly on their own experience and with none of the technology that help sailors today. Between 1855 to 1879 alone an unbelievable number of 49,322 shipwrecks were recorded in the UK, with a loss of life of 18,319.
Often, vessels were given names of their owner’s wives or ones that reflected sentiments of the time such as friendship, hope, vigilance, and harmony. My woven ‘sails’ have the names of vessels which were often belied by events e.g. Harmony was ‘abandoned’, Hope ‘lost’. For Prosperity which was ‘salvaged’ I wove colours graduating from dark and ending with optimistic warm colours denoting her resurrection from the seabed to the surface. One sail represents the fate of refugees crossing the Channel to Britain in 2024, having the colours of the national flags of Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Eritrea, Syria, and Vietnam, from which migrants who lost their lives originated from; demonstrating that despite two centuries apart these tragedies still occur.