Ymyl y tir / edge of land

attentive encounters with the stuff and soul of the seashore

The Western edge of Pembrokeshire is a place of exposure amidst towering cliffs and wild seas. A place of collision. A place of immersion.

Artists Flora McLachlan and Jess Bugler engage in an attentive encounter with this edgeland to capture something elusive.

Their collaborative exploration is revealed in the prints, drawings, sculptures that wash around the gallery in a tideline of paper, metal, wood and orange net twine.

“The artists have worked to let the sea-swell tangle their work together and deposit it at high tide mark on the walls and floor of the gallery. Close attention will be rewarded with glimpses of mer-people and selkies, mythical creatures who inhabit these unquiet margins - but step carefully, for all the forces of nature are also recreated here to make a place of potential danger and darkness dominated by the authority of the wild, wild sea.” Emma Gregory

Jess Bugler

I am drawn to the materiality of this place, this threshold between land and sea, bearing witness to its peculiar vitality and affect. For me, it is a place where the forces of the non-human world dominate, a space to step outside ourselves, to see beyond ourselves.

To uncover the stuff of this place, my work takes Rebecca Solnit’s description of the seashore as an “essential meeting of differences”, and moves from interrogations of conflict and permanence, to uncover the transitory, mutable and porous boundaries that resonate here and thus in us.

After time drawing and being in this place, I have used a combination of processes, including collagraph, woodcut and risograph, to create my prints, objects and experiential installations. Adopting the language of folding, the texture of carborundum grit and the resistance of wax, I hope to speak to the essence of this edge of land.

Flora McLachlan

The seashore is where one world meets another. At this boundary, where solid changes to liquid, identities shift and become blurred; we may grow a tail below the waist, become half fish and swim away, or emerge from the waves and root in the waving grasses, bending to the sea wind. For me, the sea is a dream realm, echoing the inner ocean of the unconscious, where everything is sifted and transformed.

The way the sea tumbles and shapes objects became an inspiration for how to make this body of work; I immerse my copper etching plates in a corrosive salt to evoke sea-worn objects. I worked intuitively, tangling beautiful flotsam gathered from the tideline together with imagined artefacts like washed-up mermaid accessories, trying to bring improbable story-relics in to shore.