A serious retrospective of the Welsh-born artist Gwen John: Unusual Beauties on the Nationwide Museum Cardiff within the first half of 2026 assembled rarely-seen work from the archives of the Nationwide Museum in Cardiff and galleries worldwide. In an in-depth, wide-ranging essay in O’r Pedwar Gwynt (Wales), Marc Edwards asks the reader to think about John’s oeuvre from many angles. Edwards questions the curator’s tendency to ‘pedestalise’ the artist as ‘a feminist icon’, suggesting she was a much more complicated character than such a label would permit.
On the one hand, John was radically impartial, positioned her artwork on the centre of her world, and refused marriage and youngsters. She was one of many first girls to coach on the Slade Faculty of Artwork in London. Her feminine figures refuse objectification. However, John was inextricably tethered to her brother Augustus John and virtually enslaved to sculptor Auguste Rodin, who based on Edwards, used her emotionally, sexually and artistically. She additionally relied on him financially.
There are virtually two thousand letters from John to Rodin held within the Musée Rodin in Paris. We should take into account the ‘darkish risk’, says Edwards, that ‘her relationship with Rodin was essential to her genius’. An image emerges of an artist pushed by competing passions: for her artwork, for erotic love (with women and men), and for God. From these contradictions emerge transcendent portraits of ladies usually shielded by curtains and layers of clothes.
Was Gwen John a Welsh artist, or British, or European? The Welsh artwork world is actually eager to assert her, though artwork historian Peter Lord stays sceptical. John didn’t have interaction emotionally or intellectually with Wales, but in addition by no means absolutely immersed herself right into a French id. Edwards believes that, finally, ‘the work was every little thing to Gwen John – artwork with out boundaries’.
Fictional Wales
On vacation in La Rochelle, Mererid Puw Davies comes throughout a journey article written by a French author about Wales. The author expresses a way of isolation, of being on the sting of the world. It’s a well-known trope in literature: Wales is usually represented as being empty of individuals, a ‘clean area’. Paradoxically, this journey piece is about Swansea, a densely populated metropolis. ‘Can we not see, usually’, Davies asks, ‘that which we expect to see?’
She quotes literary scholar Christina Les, who has studied representations of Wales in European writing: ‘Wales the place due to this fact appears to be a portal to a sure sort of area, characterised by otherness, liminality and distance’. Fictional characters are sometimes trying to escape a disaster. They’re blinded to the world round them, wrapped up of their ache. That is true of the protagonist in Und jeden Morgen das Meer (‘And the ocean every morning’) (2018) by Karl-Heinz Ott. On this novel, Aberystwyth is reimagined as ‘Abydyr’, a desolate place seen by way of the eyes of a grieving widow.
Immersing herself in style literature from Germany, particularly romance novels set in Wales, Puw Davies encounters a really totally different nation: one full of individuals and heat. The protagonists fall in love with those that care ‘for nature, for individuals, for animals’. These widespread tales are full of fine meals and hospitality in addition to traumatic previous occasions. They provide a sunnier imaginative and prescient of Wales. Though they don’t provide an entirely correct illustration, the writer would reasonably reside on this world than within the loveless desert of Abydyr.
Tourism and sci-fi
Mary-Ann Constantine is on a day journey to Loch Katrine in Scotland, arguably the birthplace of Scottish tourism. She considers the affect of Sir Walter Scott, and his lengthy poem, ‘The Girl of the Lake’, on the event of the tourism business right here. Like Davies, she acknowledges that locations like these are ‘an odd mixture of reality and fantasy’. Such magical landscapes are inclined to generate inventive work, which in flip form how the place is skilled.
Loch Katrine had a profound affect on Jules Verne, who visited in 1859. Constantine finds one in every of his novels in a present store, The Underground Metropolis, translated from Les Indes Noires (1877). She reads it on an extended practice journey and is captivated. Verne portrays an underground world constructed beneath a loch to faucet right into a coal seam, which each ‘displays and critiques life on the floor’.
On this world, the employees are pleased and secure from the world’s storms. It’s a ‘capitalist fantasy’ by an writer who subscribed to his society’s utopian concepts about progress, expertise, and an obedient workforce.
The sphere of power research is rising in response to the environmental disaster. Constantine seems on the dialogue of the historical past of coal in current works and reminds us of its relevance to our lives right this moment. ‘We will by no means be within the warmth of the second’, she reminds us, quoting educational and activist Andreas Malm. We will solely be ‘within the warmth of this ongoing previous’.
Trauma and The Troubles
Liadan Ní Chuinn, the writer of Each One Nonetheless Right here (2025) is a non-binary author from Belfast, publishing beneath a pseudonym. They had been born in 1998, the yr of the Good Friday Settlement, and are too younger to recollect the bombs, homicide, and kidnappings. However the tales reside on in public consciousness, Angharad Penrhyn Jones.
This ‘exceptional’ debut of quick tales examines questions of intergenerational trauma, grief, silence, and the act of naming. It has taken the literary world by storm with its unflinching accounts of the crimes dedicated by British Troopers in Northern Eire.
Jones contextualises the work inside a postcolonial framework. These characters are all grappling with questions of what it means to reside in a violent, exploitative world. The writer’s anger appears to pulsate on the web page. The writing ‘raises ethical questions on guilt and complicity,’ says Jones, ‘implying that every one in every of us is stained, both for committing a criminal offense or refusing to forestall a criminal offense from occurring’.
