'Field Guide to the Offa's Dyke', Tulca Festival 2025, Galway
Medium: dyed waxed canvas, aluminium tubing, metal fixings, hand-stitched wool blanket, printed textile banner, ceramic details, pewter cast bracken fronds
The Offa’s dyke, an ancient border earthwork, makes a physical line and shape across the Welsh borderland landscape that rolls over fields and mountain ranges. The fact that that it is an old border and a tangible one (removed from the current political border, although not entirely dormant), seems to allow more space for speculation and the exploration of alternative narratives and histories than the current borderline might.
‘A Field Guide to the Offa’s Dyke’, explores the psychogeography of the dyke in present time, and imagines the Welsh borderlands and dual identity as a space of creative potential. The ancient border earthwork is manifested as a sculptural construction based on a cross-section of the dyke. Its looming and irregular form when viewed on approach from one side gives way to an open space on the other. The stitched wool blanket hanging underneath reinvents a slogan from the 1600s painted on a farmhouse inhabited by members of my family. The new version of the slogan reads ‘Nid ni oddi wrth frenhinoedd, na brenhinoedd oddi wrthym ni’ (‘Not We From Kings, Nor Kings From Us.’). Opposite the shelter/cross-section piece hangs a gauzy, semi-transparent textile banner depicting a handmade tent pitched astride the Offa’s dyke at Edenhope hill.
This piece was commissioned by Tulca festival 2025 as part of a project initiated by Mair Hughes titled 'Borderlands/Y Gororau'. The project explores the potency, plurality and value of Welsh borderland landscapes, and personal experiences of dual identity. Alongside the artist Emily Joy and writer/researcher Durre Shahwar, Hughes has responded to sites along the Offa’s dyke and across the Welsh borderlands.
