The Menai mermaids.
I live and work on the north Wales coast. I love its tempestuous variability – there are days when it’s so hot that in the shimmering haze and blinding light, tiny lizards can be found on our sand dunes. There are days when it’s so cold that the greyness and the rain seep right off the slated chapel roofs and into your soul, soaking you from inside out. A day amongst the Snowdonian mountains is a blessing or a blasphemy, depending upon when you go.
But there’s a hidden landscape here, where snow has never fallen in over eighty years. There are groves of trees that have never lost their leaves, and it is always summer.
As you gaze, in the middle distance you see a leaden statue of a warrior on hoseback. He points his sword across a sparklng bay, with eyes that see nothing of the tumbling moutainscape he inhabits. A distance away, on the water, a sailor plies a gondola across the summer-seas, his arm frozen in a gridlock of foaming waves.
Neither man has moved a hair’s breadth since before the second world war, when they were painted upon the 17.5 metre long wall of the dining room at Plas Newydd.
The house is the ancestral home of the marquess of Anglesey, though now is
given into the care of the National Trust.
It’s a pebble’s throw from the Menai straits, and in former times, when the family held dinner parties there, they must have heard the lapping of the water through the open windows when they were thrown open on warm evenings.
On one side of that table, guests could soak up the breathtaking views of the mountains – at least when they were visible through the thickly knitted, Welsh mists. Guests on the other side of the table were faced with a blank wall, until Rex Whistler was commissioned to paint the mural in this room.
Family legend had it that the house is so close to the sea that Neptune himself was an unseen guest at their dinner table….. and so Whistler painted his wet footprints on the stone jetty, leading into the room as he stole in to take his place amongst the sparkling guests, and the gleaming candlelit crystalware.
What would his place setting have looked like?
Ruler of the seven oceans, surely he would deserve better than a Sheffield plated fork, and a bowl from the midland potteries?
Did the family think he was alone? The single set of footprints seem to confirm that theory. But what God is ever alone? Who were his companions?
This crown is the first of the pieces I have made for one of neptune’s imagined coterie. Nestled amongst the gemstones are pebbles, pieces of glass picked up from the shore, the shells of limpets, cockles, a piece of broken wine bottle, a found marble and a tiny sea-sponge.
They’re encased in silver bladderwrack seaweed, and each tiny blister is created from the melted cutout pieces that dropped out from between the fronds as I was sawing it.
I shall add spoons, knives, pepper dishes and other tableware, to make a place setting belonging to one of Neptune’s companions as they take their places for a sumptuous feast, an imaginary dinner party,
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