The art historian, Peter Lord, refers to the custom among the Victorian and Edwardian Welsh of decorating their homes with portraits of the hoelion mawr: literally, the ‘big nails’ of the Nonconformist movement whose preaching had earned them a kind of celebrity status. This series considers seminal portraits and photographs of some of the greatest Welsh writers of the Twentieth Century.
The writer and philosopher, D. J. Williams, whose memoir, Hen Dy Ffarm (The Old Farmhouse) seems a kindlier, more sociable masterpiece than Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, is commemorated by Ned Thomas for his devotion to the Christian religion and the culture of Wales, ignored and devalued by the British state, and for the gentleness and humility of his manner. A song by Dafydd Iwan remembers him as y wên na phyla amser (the smile that time cannot fade). This informal picture shows the same celebration of humanity and landscape that make his work ineradicable from the mind.
Blobish, Psychrolutes marcidus | Image Source
Dr Sarah Gallup is a clinical psychologist at the California Department of State Hospitals. She also runs a podcast exploring the history of mental health care and the stories of people who lived or worked Behind the Walls of the World’s Psychiatric Hospitals. In six recent episodes she reads from Dangerous Asylums...
Read postAll newsThe day was dull, rather misty, and wet under foot, but neither too warm nor too cold for walking. I began to think (without being especially aware that I was thinking) about the place of blood in Christian iconography, about the chapel in which I was raised, which seemed mildly obsessed with it...
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