The Woman

To celebrate the centenary of the birth of poet R.S. Thomas I was invited to make work for an exhibition in Plas Glyn-y-Weddw, north Wales.
This is one poem. ‘The Woman’ is a timeless paean to the female, as a universal and transcendental force, more than an equal to God, with whom She strikes a deal. The act of translating these poems and then ‘scribbling’ them onto the paper, combines an attempt to simulate the pages of a writer’s notebooks, and the hastily written school blackboard, or ‘learning aid’ of the past; an act of ‘making’ and of ‘instruction’. But, as they are my own attempts to translate the poems, they also become double translations, from English to Welsh and from text to image (though the text in effect becomes the image here). My translations were worked directly into the drawings with the erasures and mistakes visible to all. Thus, they are contingent, not fixed as they are on the printed page, subject to change, blotting, seepage of ink and erasure of charcoal. Fragile, in a sense, like the very culture and language of Wales, but here presented in glass boxed frames, like objects in a museum.

The Woman by R. S. Thomas

So beautiful--God himself quailed
at her approach: the long body curved
like the horizon. Why had he made
her so? How would it be, she said,
leaning towards him, if instead of
quarreling over it, we divided it
between us? You can have all the credit
for its invention, if you will leave the ordering
of it to me. He looked into her
eyes and saw far down the bones
of the generations that would navigate
by those great stars, but the pull of it
was too much. Yes, he thought, give me their minds'
tribute, and what they do with their bodies
is not my concern. He put his hand in his side
and drew out the thorn for the letting
of the ordained blood and touched her with
it. Go, he said. They shall come to you for ever
with their desire, and you shall bleed for them in return.