Owain Train McGilvary and Dylan Huw: Fel gwacter

Exhibition

Owain Train McGilvary and Dylan Huw, Fel gwacter, 2024, Film Still.

Owain Train McGilvary and Dylan Huw are both invested in the excavatory potential of moving-image media, as a form whose agility in combining and layering different times and places bears a unique capacity to disturb – and pervert – hegemonic impulses. Fel gwacter (2024), their first collaboration, speculates upon gaps and absences in inherited understandings of Welsh pasts, by looking to a transhistorical ‘queer fabulation’ as method.

The film’s visual vocabulary centres on a dialogue between two spatial environments of well-known significance: the storerooms of the national art collection in Cardiff, and Dinorwic Quarry’s abandoned Anglesey Barracks. Fel gwacter proposes these two sites as mirrors of each other: tactile, living repositories of history, where we might touch (even cruise) long-past encounters and experiences – both actual and fantasised.

Collaging together far-reaching media archives as well as writing and drawing exchanged over a six-month period, Fel gwacter turns a forensic gaze to Welsh and queer archives of different kinds, rejecting simplistic narratives of “rediscovery” or “reclamation” and trespassing across borders of genre, language, time and place. Featuring sound design by Talulah Thomas, the film both mourns and celebrates all the unrecorded, unarchived encounters which have come before us.

The film lasts 28 minutes and starts playing every half-hour.

This new work has been commissioned through the CELF programme, the national contemporary art gallery for Wales. Mostyn is one of the CELF partnership of eleven venues across Wales that work together to create and deliver opportunities for people to be able to access and enjoy artworks from the Welsh national collection of contemporary art, at Amgueddfa Cymru and the National Library of Wales. CELF is supported by the Welsh Government.

Artist profiles and statements