Archive | Heb Ffiniau

About the project

Heb Ffiniau is a research and development project that explores the connection between Language, Identity and Landscape, and how they shape our sense of belonging.

Bringing together professional artists and performers, and individuals who have a long-standing interest and experience in movement work, performance and the arts, this is a means to unlock a creative dialogue, and provide a creative online space to share and explore ideas. This will be a personal journey for each individual involved culminating in a collective response to the themes.

Welcome to our new gallery page!

If you have found your way here, welcome! We have lots of exciting news following our project celebration last, a huge thank you to everyone who joined us! You can now access all three Heb Ffiniau videos on one link, offering the viewer a chance to see the wonderful work as it emerged throughout the research and development process.

What does language mean to you? 'Heart and Sky'

Welcome!

We are really excited today to bring you as promised, some of the individual artist responses. Three questions were posed during the project, the first being 'What does language mean to you?'

'Somewhere in the space between us there's a whisper of a dance big enough for all of us' - Wendy Ostler

Perthyn - Belonging soundtrack - trac sain

A few words from Sarah

The connection between language, landscape and belonging is something that I have been pondering for years really, particularly growing up in the rugged landscape of North Wales, and growing up bilingually, speaking both Welsh and English. Where I feel I most belong iswhen I’m out in the mountains, the springy purple heather, buzzards circling above, the sheep grazing on the slopes, not a soul to be seen, all weathers, I love the rain. The slate quarries were the backdrop to my childhood, I have memories of playing in the old railway carts that used to carry the slate, and the purple-blue piles of slate waste, that glow gold in the sun, feel familiar, and feel like home.

But home and belonging don’t quite equate to the same thing, I couldn’t quite fathom how I could have such a deep connection with the landscape, this landscape, but also often feel like I didn’t belong in this place I call home. Then there was language, which again was a huge part of my childhood growing up speaking two languages, how could language can be such a drive for positive and bring people together, but on the other hand also create such a divide.Identity, what makes us who we are? Who am I? All these ruminations were surfacing from my own experiences and I was definitely trying to make some sense of them.

It became very clear that the project needed more than just my voice, and that these are things that are so relevant to us all, and each of us have different experiences that form so many different perspectives when we begin to delve into the interconnectedness and emotional impact of our individual stories, it is fascinating. We ended up with an amazing group of people involved in the project, and in some way I think it helped us all get through the difficult time of the pandemic, through connecting and sharing, and perhaps just having something else to focus on and think about.

It really was a very special project, and on a personal level quite cathartic, listening to other people, opening my eyes to looking at things in a different way, and finally the overriding sense that all these things are transient, they are not fixed, and they are always changing, there is no one way to look at anything, this in itself has been incredibly freeing.

Early on in the process Heb Ffiniau became something that had it’s own life, it’s own energy, it became it’s own entity in a way, representing a space to come together, to talk, share, and create, a space without boundaries, and it belonged to all the individuals that were a part of the original project, in my mind it still does, we created this space together. But as with the transient nature of life and art Heb Ffiniau is now also a space to explore new things, new ideas, and new creative journeys, and to hopefully share these with a wider audience.

Sarah Mumford

Movement Artist