Dylan Williams: Lie down and listen to the ground breathe

In Dylan Williams’ painting, an unconscious and conscious process of re-tracing, through the land, is key. He makes and repeats walks, from dawn to dusk. Long summer daylight extends these expeditions over 12 hours; an emersion; a meditation into place. As light levels fall and forms emerge from the edges of vision, memory, and imagination, metaphors and narratives, begin to populate the mind’s eye and the pictures’ plane. Williams follows familiar routes into the hinterland of his home, to places he knows from teenage cycles and family walks around the lands and wastelands of Afan Valley (Wales) and the retelling of family history, speaking again of these places known to him through his family’s past work, when the disused coal mines were fully active and his ancestors were down in the ground below the thin grass or up on the mountain building the hills. His paintings are renditions, resonations of stories and songs, sung and sunk into the earth. These are not distant landscapes over there, but are here in the presence of earth, trees, wind, water, here, in his hands, under his body; his walking feet, his waking daydreams. The distant places in the paintings are nearness, past, and/or future. 

Text by Catrin Webster