Reflections on an Island Utopia: Ben Lloyd
Amy Grandvoinet reflects on the opening night of Ben Lloyd’s Gwales exhibition at the Arts Centre in Aberystwyth.
It was a hot, balmy September night at the Arts Centre in Aberystwyth. The concrete steps of its brutalist blocks were seeped in sunset, seagulls’ and butterflies’ silhouettes flitted like bats, and wine waited on tables upstairs in Gallery 2. Ben Lloyd was about to speak on his exhibition, Gwales. In a lazy hazy blissful buzz, attendees gathered round to listen in. Everything felt kind of dreamy.
Ben’s installation – a black silage-bale house, a 9-minute film, and a little paper pamphlet – imagines a utopian island. That island is Gwales (pronounced ‘Gwah-lehs’) from the thirteenth-century Mabinogi story ‘The Assembly of the Wondrous Head’. In ‘The Assembly of the Wondrous Head’, a group of comrades, guided by the severed talking head of Bendigeidran, escape the political tribulations of their usual existence to a distant palace of gleaming white marble across calm open seas. Here, they thrive in safety for eighty full years, happy and unbothered, but totally isolated. At the end of the myth, a forbidden door is opened and all host of complex realities come flooding back in. A utopian Gwales is revealed as a fragile ephemera; it could never last, and indeed it collapses.
Ben’s take on Gwales figures the Mabinogi’s émigrés as present-day Welsh citizens striving to save the scraps of their culture, at that same island refuge once more. Priced out of their homes by neoliberalist forces, they flee landscapes bereaved by gentrification and hollowed into holiday-making money machines for the rich. It’s a phenomenon happening globe-over, but Wales feels it keenly.
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