Tanwen Wilkinson's ceramic sculptures are organic shapes. She is inspired by stories and life's journey that carves itself on our faces. Tanwen works with a sense of place creating narrative from environment.
The installation Tanwen is showing will include some of the 200 unique ceramic swallows she first created as an act of remembrance and celebration of the wild beauty of the Epynt and to raise awareness of the people displaced from there and from other places around the world.
"Displaced communities are nothing new; sadly their story is all too familiar but to the community of Epynt, it truly was “the end of the world” as the old lady of Hirllwyn Farm put it as she watched the family furniture being moved by horse and cart.
In 2020 descendants and friends of the Epynt community commemorated the 80th anniversary of the “Chwalfa” – the turning out of 54 families – over 200 adults and children – at short notice from their homes and livelihood when the Ministry of Defence seized 30,000 acres at Epynt to turn it into a training area and firing range.
Cymdeithas Y Cymod / The Reconciliation Fellowship supported the collaboration with Tanwen on a project inspired by the commemorations and by the powerful message of a poem written by the pacifist poet, Waldo Williams – “Daw’r Wennol yn Ôl I’w Nyth” [The Swallow Will Return to her Nest]. In exploring the hopeful symbolism of the swallow, Tanwen created over 200 unique ceramic swallows using clay from significant sites on Epynt and ancient techniques for working the clay. Moulded from clay from streams and riverbeds, the birds were an embodiment of the wild beauty of the mountain landscape and the spirit of its people since earliest times.
Their raku glaze reminds us of feathers or veins or even the sheep lines and paths crossing the mountain which have been replaced by a web of targets on a military map. The swallows catch the breeze, whistling their message of hope to all displaced peoples that one day they can return to their homes and homelands. Some of the swallows were perched on hawthorn branches, blackened and jagged by weather and supported on a stand of sharp industrial lines."
Tanwen is fascinated by the process of collecting earth, extracting clay and the creating of soft malleable marks bringing something into being, fired jagged brittle and precious. Using Raku (in Japanese meaning Happy accident) Tanwen creates theatre, red hot pots from the kiln are plunged into dustbins of combustible materials.
Moving to Crai in the Bannau Brecheiniog in 2010 with her partner Gareth and 3 children Tanwen works as a freelance artist / art director in TV and film as well as being a Forest School practitioner at Ysgol Y Bannau and running a smallholding.