Notes from The Singing Hills // March 2021
An Emotional Reunion
Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus, Happy St. David’s Day. This issue of ‘Notes from The Singing Hills’ is the first using the newsletter and blog platform Substack. In due course, I will migrate the previous issues in the archive over here also. You can also subscribe to my other, monthly newsletter, here.
An Emotional Reunion
The restrictions placed on travel during pandemic has disrupted my ability to continue the work for this project. However, last year, during the brief window we were allowed to travel, we went to North Wales to visit my father and I was able to make arrangements to meet one person and make her portrait.
Ellen and I met up outside in the garden of her house in Llanedwen on Ynys Môn observing social distancing rules. How did I end up there? Well, back when I visited Poultney, Vermont, in 2019, I had met and photographed Kathy Mahar Stephenson. Kathy and I were going through her old family photos while she was explaining the family tree in the US and Wales. She told me then that Ellen was a cousin of hers, and then she mentioned another name that sounded familiar, a niece of Ellen’s. After asking a few questions and determining location and business we were able to work out that Kathy is related through Ellen to the woman who acted as the director for my mother’s funeral in 2018.
When I met up with Ellen, she made sure her niece was there so I got to meet her again. It was a very emotional moment for me.
St. David’s Day print sale
I was rummaging around in the print drawers recently and I discovered my exhibition prints for the Northern Eye Festival in 2017. After a conversation with Paul Sampson, curator for Oriel Colwyn and the Northern Eye Festival, I’m delighted to be able to release a few of these for sale.
They are A3 prints, printed by Oriel Colwyn for the exhibition. The prints were mounted using drawing pins (thumb tacks) so have small holes in the corners, but these would be obscured by matt boards upon framing.
Galleries, like many businesses, have been hit hard by COVID, so half of the proceeds from the sale of these prints will go to Oriel Colwyn, a vital enterprise that does so much work to bring photography to the public and students of North Wales.
Each print is £100 (A3 prints would normally go for £200 in my shop).
You, my newsletter subscribers, are the first to get the details for this print sale which is ‘first come, first served’ for these one-off exhibition prints.
Visit my print shop here: https://www.edbrydon.com/shop
Black River journal
In case you missed it last year, I'm delighted to let you know that this project was been featured in the first online issue of Black River journal.
Find out more about the project, how I came to be working on it and more about my background and influences in the interview.
Interesting things from around the web
I posted this on Facebook, but for those who missed it there, I revisited and reread this article after learning of the death of writer Jan Morris last year. It is an extremely poignant article, marked straight away in the title. But there is a small passage on hiraeth, from her last book 'Thinking Again' published in 2020, that is think is particularly noteworthy.
Hiraeth is a difficult word to translate directly into English but is often ascribed to have a spiritual connection to the idea of ‘home’. It is certainly one of those feelings I am trying to touch upon in this project; however, I have deliberately avoided centering it as it has become quite well known and its usage in art, photography and writing might now be on the verge of becoming cliché.
Incredible photographs of Llandudno in the ‘70s and an interview with the photographer, Michael Bennett, in Offline.
Photographer David Mayne has a new book out, Yma/Here, which he describes as: “An ambiguous and wide ranging examination of the urban topography of South Wales and the West of England from 2016 to 2018.” You can buy the book directly from his shop.
As many of you know, I received a ‘Many Voices, One Nation’, commission from the Welsh Parliament in 2019. In 2020, several photographers were nominated by their peers to receive new commissions for ‘Many Voices One Nation 2’. Congratulations to all those chosen, everyone has interesting and distinct work. There’s more about the exhibit in Wales Arts Review.
Final note
Thank you for reading. While this newsletter is specific to this project I have another monthly newsletter called The [ED]it where I write more generally on things I am thinking about in photography and editing. It also contains news updates about my other projects, ‘one image’ where I showcase a new image or one form the archive and give a bit of the background behind it and other things I’ve found interesting that month. If you’d like to have a read and sign up you can do so here. Lastly, don’t forget the print sale, link in the button below. Diolch yn fawr.
About me:
I am a photographer and writer available for commissions based near Farnham, Surrey, in south east England, just 45 minutes from London. I also regularly work in North Wales.
My more recent work explores personal connections to place, the land and natural environment, how each of those, and the connections between them, are changing.
In 2017 my ongoing project on people of North Welsh heritage in the northeast US was exhibited at Northern Eye Festival. It was subsequently awarded a commission from the Welsh Parliament in 2019 for exhibition around Wales in 2019-20.
You can find out more on my website here.
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