Dreamwork: Art, fiction and political imagination in Wales
In the latest article collaboration between Wales Arts Review and the Western Mail, writer Kandace Siobhan Walker explores the power of speculative art and wonders what it might mean for the future of Wales as a nation...
increasingly authoritarian culture, the rise of populism and the expansion of state violence, mirroring the warning of the second future-wales visited in Elis’ novel.
The discursive relationship between the arts and Wales’ political landscape, however, reaches beyond literature and television, beyond science fiction and fantasy into every genre and medium.
The interplay between loss and possibility, the romance of forgotten pasts and undetermined futures, finds resonance within speculative art that draws meaning from religious texts.
Clive hicks-jenkins’ romantic and reflective paintings feel like a kind of everyday mythology. his colourful, cubist subjects are often presented as biblical analogues, his titles referencing specific narratives or figures. With works like Christ Writes In The Dust (2011) and The Prophet Fed By A raven (Elijah And The raven) (2007), hicks-jenkins constructs a visual language that deftly invokes the literary sensibilities and artistic traditions of Welsh folklore.
hicks-jenkins’ distinctive style feels simultaneously (and paradoxically) pragmatic and sentimental, in a way that recalls the geometric forms of The Wrexham Tailor’s Quilt (1842-52), created by James Williams.
The quilt interweaves traditional folk and religious imagery with figures drawn from everyday life, imbuing the present-day with a sense of deep symbolism. As in hicks-jenkins’ paintings, Williams creates alternate realities by merging the mythological, the historical with the material.
The effect of this collage of aesthetics and philosophies is the suggestion of possibility, a hinting at alternate-presents toward which we might move.
Within the cosmologies of Welsh myth and folklore, we find the familiar themes that characterise the genres of science-fiction and fantasy. Both literary traditions confront expressions of spirituality and the metaphysical – acknowledging those forces beyond our control – and depict struggles against repression and domination, all while questioning ideas of power and responsibility.
Patience Agbabi addresses themes of alienation and marginalisation in her poem UFO Woman (Pronounced Oofoe), which begins with a description of other-ing encounters with border control agents at an airport: ‘Can I have / my clothes back when you’ve finished with them, please?’
The poem uses the vocabularies of science fiction to examine racism and xenophobia, presenting an experience of alienation that functions as both metaphorical and literal. Throughout the poem, Agbabi toys with the double-meaning of ‘alien’ as a figure in science fiction and its legal definition in immigration law.
In a performance video, Agbabi, her skin painted iridescent silver and her voice modulated, recites the poem between clips of her passing through security checks in a series of chrome and neon rooms. In the future-world presented by the poem, the prejudice levelled at the speaker’s alienness finds its roots in the transatlantic slave trade: ‘Slave ship: space ship, racism: spacism.’
In the same way that Elis’ novel suggests that the dystopian future-wales has roots in the country’s historically extractive and oppressive relationship with England, Agbabi similarly extrapolates histories of anti-black racism to a future where manifestations of these same violences reproduce the same conditions.
Dystopias in speculative writing may appear pessimistic, but in actuality these nightmare-worlds advise caution, serving as warnings of where such destructive, dehumanising political ideologies will lead us.
Fantasy literature, like science fiction, is equally occupied with political questions about repression, domination and self-determination.
Jo Walton’s hugo Award-winning novel Among Others offers a world where magic exists beneath the visible reality of the everyday world, like a river flowing underground. Walton’s protagonist, Morwenna, is herself a reader of science fiction and fantasy literature: ‘One of the things I’ve always liked
about science fiction is the way it makes you think about things and look at things from angles you’d never have thought about before.’
The worldbuilding, sense-making capacity of speculative art and literature is its strength.
In the sculptural, interdisciplinary practices of artists like Sarah Jenkins and Cerith Wyn Evans, the speculative tradition of worldbuilding takes shape as neon questions and experimental furniture, as fictional machines and musical chandeliers.
Jenkins’ work explores ‘imagined worlds, distorted futures and dysfunctional objects,’ with multimedia sculptures like Spill And Bridge (2019) articulating an interest in what uses we may derive from worlds that are neither real nor representative and from objects that have no apparent utility. Evans’ installations similarly rely upon this collapse of reality and dreamscape, staging neon signage among leafy trees and programming glass light fixtures to respond to sound.
What makes speculative artwork feel so deeply meaningful, what gives science fiction and fantasy that generative power, is precisely this dedication to the embrace and celebration of what we don’t yet know, what doesn’t yet exist.
Daniel Trivedy’s 2022 installation Between A Dream And A Nightmare at Elysium Gallery in Swansea welcomed visitors into a handpainted chamber with a hammock at its centre, encouraging guests to become part of the work rather than remaining its viewer. Beside this tropical island imagery, blackened husks of corn lay on a patchwork quilt in shades of blue next to an overturned wicker basket.
In an accompanying statement, Trivedy identifies the emotional landscape between ‘a positive, inclusive future’ and history’s ‘colonial injustice’ as a space defined by potentially unnavigable contradictions. Knowing this, the artist cites reconciliation and wonder as necessary to enduring the strain of this journey. The work’s invitation of its audience into itself speaks to the value of collective acts, to togetherness as an essential feature of navigating the world.
From medieval art and literature through to the present day, the transformative abilities of collective imagination repeatedly appear as central themes in Welsh storytelling.
Even farther back than Elis’ future-wales, the narrator of Arthur Machen’s 1915 novella The Great Return visits a small, hillside town that has become a sudden utopia following the return of a religious relic that the townspeople believe to be the Holy Grail, or Greal Sanctaidd, of Arthurian legend. Machen’s story focuses more on addressing the spiritual causes and consequences of the town’s transformation but, in describing shifts in the townspeople’s relationships to each other and to the wider world, offers a speculative perspective on the social nature of change.
His narrator describes a ‘season of wonder [during which] the corn shot up and the grass thickened and the fruit was multiplied on the trees.’ Despite the apparent effect that this fleeting encounter with paradise has on the town and its residents, Machen’s narrator remains sceptical, wondering if they perhaps had, influenced by medieval folklore passed down through generations, collectively hallucinated or imagined the wonder.
Eventually, however, he concedes that reality may be simply what we choose to believe it is, or could be: ‘In other words, did the people ‘see’ and ‘hear’ what they expected to see and hear?’
This suggestion that the world can become whatever we expect it to become offers an argument against the apathy that haunts contemporary political discourse.
The proposition that we may bear imaginative responsibility for the world we live in feels strangely emancipatory. What actions we take and the decisions we make are limited only by the possibilities we dream – when we find ourselves unwillingly restricted by political structures and economic relationships to which we did not agree, we must rely upon our creativity to imagine alternatives and to make those ideas a reality.
After Ifan wakes in the second future-wales, distressed and confused, he asks what happened to the utopia he had just visited. His host sadly tells him: ‘You were dreaming, my boy.’ But this does not dissuade the character from the reality of his experience, nor the reality of the future he witnessed, because it is his understanding that there are multiple futures.
So, Ifan spends the remainder of the novel trying to return to his dream, embodying Elis’ refusal to concede to the paucity of a future where no one speaks Welsh, where the arts aren’t funded, where the distribution of wealth has deepened to irreparable extremes. His character believes that ‘what will happen in the future is constantly being decided by whatever is happening in the present moment’ and, therefore, that his actions in his present will determine whether his future crystallises into the dystopic police-state or the egalitarian paradise.
Elis’ future-wales reminds us that the future won’t necessarily be a mere extension of the structures of domination and repression that exist today and that it is within our power to make that determination.
When we imagine the political future of Wales, we might first wonder about the realities and mechanics of a referendum on national independence or the extension, or shrinking, of devolutionary powers.
But I would argue that we should instead turn our thoughts to the wild and weird, the dreams that do not presently seem possible. That’s where the ideas that will catch our collective imagination live and that’s where we will begin to build a political reality that is worthy of the people who live within it.
After all, it is people whose lives and work create the world, so it follows that it will be the dreams of those same people that will create the next one.
Speculative art and fiction present mediums to look into the future, to wield the imagination as a crystal ball and, in Wales, our literary and artistic traditions are as rigorous in their dedication to and engagement with the political crises and questions that we face as our government officials and our politicians.
And even though we haven’t visited the future yet, we have all imagined what it might look like and so we have a responsibility, I believe, to work away from political discussions that adhere to the logic of destructive, inequitable systems. So, we work towards the dream instead.
We should turn our thoughts to the wild and weird, the dreams that do not presently seem possible. That’s where the ideas that will catch our collective imagination live
This article continues a new series of collaborations between the Western Mail and Wales Arts Review which will appear in Weekend magazine twice a month.
You can also read these new features plus more articles, reviews and interviews with Wales’ artists by subscribing to Wales Arts Review’s new e-newsletter available through www.walesartsreview.org