Cai Tomos - March 2015
In March 2015 Cai Tomos came to Abercych for a residency at 2 Penrhiw. Here is a document of Cai’s ‘sharing’ at the end of the residency and some words about the time he spent in the village.
Cai writes, “Thresholds that appear in one’s artistic practice can often go unnoticed, or, can be scurried over by the demands of making or producing. The time at 2 Penrhiw allowed time to get to know not knowing again. A time to allow the emergence of a particular voice that comes from having plentiful space. The landscape reaches in and touches gently all that emerges. Creatively, there is a movement between landscape and mind. At points, they merge, into each other. It is this merging that gives voice to the ‘other’, this third element, this third presence, like the air in its quality. It touches everything.
Walking, back and fourth to Manordeifi provided a rhythm. This rhythm of walking always reminds one of the shape of one’s heart. Each step calls the heart back to it’s original shape, through the company of each footfall in time.
Events happen, big events. A wave from a stranger, from the distance becomes intimate. I carry this gesture within me on my way. The bark of a dog brings into me a fierce aliveness. I carry this bark within me. A grouse lands to my right alone but majestic, and I am visited be the thought… ‘I wonder if it will even know the vividness of its color’
In the act of dancing I hope somehow that I will disappear…. Looking upwards I see ‘the sky contains all, and nothing contains the sky.’ Maybe the same is true of dancing? The dance contains all. And nothing contains the dance.
How can I explore the possibility of falling upward? My moving and dancing pose a series of questions to the invisible, Like in prayer, you cross thresholds where you wait for same inner kindling to catch.
I wonder if it’s possible to see when I have been caught, by something, lifted upwards. Perhaps so much so that the dance kind of disappears and something other becomes visible, felt.
I’m probably speaking about faith, and dancing about it, and to it, and with it.”