Glasfryn Project

Click on the green page numbers to link to required page. Page 1 Editorial Fran Lock: With my Protecting Angels I Navigate Hell Pierre Joris: This Afternoon Dante Steph Goodger: Inferno Ellen Dillon: Seeking Dantist Allen Fisher: Proceeds in the Garden; after Dante Eléna Rivera: Speak Robert Hampson: Piazza dei Signori Philip Terry: Purgatorio Canto XI Beth Greenhalgh: Lethe Peter Hughes and David Rees: Let's Dantz   Page 2 David Annwn: Dantesserae Lee Duggan: from 'Navigation' David Rees Davies: for Dante montenegrofisher: Dragonflies Rebecca Chesney: To the Uncommitted Ian Brinton: Canto V of Inferno, plus Dante and Beckett Stephen Emmerson: circles Susan Adams: The Ha Ha Man Tom Jenks: Spiral Texts Penny Hallas: Elevator Robert...

Background to DANTESSERAE David Annwn: This sequence is ‘illusion. Artifice / as world and vice-/versa’. As usual, I don’t want to make too much sense or imply a rational overall structure because so much here is fragmentary, composed of snippets, dreams and fleeting intuition. It takes a cue from links between Dante’s late period and his viewing of various mosaics in St Vitale and other churches in Ravenna. Most of the mosaics of Ravenna were made of glass tesserae but, at the outset, I imagine the disparate sections of my sequence as resembling coloured stones suspended in space in the kind of buildings designed by Gaudi and Piranesi. These poetic sections are jagged and uneven, seemingly random in arrangement, perhaps rather like disjecta or misfits taken from different mosaics...

 To read the poem: From Navigation   Lee Duggan is a poet based in the foothills of Snowdonia.  With a focus on marginalisation she explores reclaimed landscapes through innovative approaches to language and facilitates Walking with Words for wellbeing programmes. Her debut collection, Reference Points (Aquifer 2017) received positive reviews in Poetry Wales, Eliptical Movements, and Litter Magazine, along with review of her sequence Green (Oystercatcher 2019).  Her work appeared in the important anthology of contemporary Welsh innovative poetry, The Edge of Necessary (Aquifer 2018) and more recently in Tears in the Fence, Noon, Poetry Wales, Blackbox Manifold, Molly Bloom, Tentacular and Junction Box.  She has forthcoming collections with Knives, Forks and Spoons and Contraband.   Click...

    montenegrofisher: In 'dragonflies' we re-visit Dante's text, reframing it in the form of two frogs, opening the possibility for a contemporary view of the biosphere in which the human is seen as an equal agent to the animal.     Luna Montenegro & Adrian Fisher collaborate in the making of visual & sonic arts, text, performance, films and curatorial projects. They are concerned with ideas of the non-human in relation to the Anthropocene through ritual, transformation and improvisation. Since first collaborating in January 2000 they have shown their work internationally in Museums, Art galleries, Poetry & Film Festivals, Residencies, Public spaces, Publications, Internet and Radio.        www.mmmmm.org.uk   Click here to go...

Canto V of Inferno And so descending from first to second circle, I was led to tighter confined space where greater torment pricks the soul to wail. Dreadful Minos stands there snarling peering at the guilty in the gateway; grasping himself he judges and dispatches. I tell you that when a condemned soul stands before him it confesses all; and when that specialist in sin Recognises a just destination in Inferno he winds his tail about himself to reveal the floor to which it must descend. So many standing always before him, each one facing sentence in his turn, speaks, hears and then is hurled below. When Minos glimpsed me there he paused in his great work to say ‘O you, new arrival at this grief-struck home, Be careful who you trust as you come in and don’t...

  Susan Adams: I wanted this painting to show the character of the Ha-Ha Man as one who observes if not delicately controls the machinations of human behaviour, with a particular emphasis on the despicable or in Dante-speak, the deadly sins.  Somewhere deep beneath the earth’s crust perhaps the Ha-Ha man works in a laboratory with worm holes beaming down blatant acts of greed, selfishness and cruelty that amuse him.  At particular moments he might twiddle a knob and turn up the heat on proceedings, and really make himself chortle. The painting references a news photograph of David Cameron and Lex Greenhill in an echo of a detail from a Medieval doom painting.  You can easily imagine little devils wielding forks over them as they sip tea around the campfire in Riyadh...

INFERNO   PURGATORIO   PARADISO     Tom Jenks: These pieces are part of a series called Spiral Texts, which are visual translations plotting letter frequency. The visualisations begin at the centre with the first section of text (usually chapters but cantos in Dante). The first bar shows the number of ‘a's, the second the number of ‘b's and so on through to ‘z'. The second set of bars (delineated by a change in colour) repeats the process for the second section of text and this continues until the end of the book. Spiral Texts are produced by a portmanteau procedure using Microsoft Excel, SQL Server and Tableau Desktop. I thought them particularly appropriate for Dante, given their circular nature.     Tom Jenks’ books...

https://youtu.be/mGyQ03amwqo In this video-sequence, the Divine Comedy is relocated to a brutalist office-block in Cardiff city centre. (To watch this video full-screen click on the title and name, top-left in the video window. This will take you to Youtube). Penny Hallas: I am interested in trying to capture something of the way the world, art and the human psyche interact with and modify one another, seeking visual equivalents for passing states of being, and for the ways in which recognisable forms, systems and patterns are continually being broken into and transformed by irrational and sometimes blindly destructive forces of desire and fantasy. Penny Hallas is an artist who lives and works in Powys. https://pennyhallas.co.uk https://www.instagram.com/pennyhallas/   Click...

Thinking About Dante lo Alighieri has got off au revoir to all that Samuel Beckett he yearns for the new, simply, not the novel this or that, but the ‘new, now’ as he styles it. He tries to speak of truth but nobody heeds, as though he’s out of date, rather than out of patience bridges collapse, tunnels tunnel. He’s amazed at this maze all the way to the pub, guzzling until sundown and moonrise, turning the thousand pages that cover the first 35 years of our hero, and peering at his piratical portrait: that singular eye and his single woman startle with their remote beauty. Out in the territory, he’s wary of young men with slavering death dogs pulling at taut leads, of wingéd people who flutter too close. He’s also aware tree pollen is his biggest challenge finding...

Stephen Emmerson: I've been writing a lot of poems recently that use basic geometrical patterns and shapes in place of traditional lyric sentiment - so I thought I'd try and see if I could respond to the Commedia in the same way.   To read the poems: circles   Stephen Emmerson is a lyric poet who's work is often described as innovative or experimental. Concerned with form and the boundaries of language his most recent practice explores personal history, trauma, and the nature and geography of Romney Marsh. He is the author of   A Piece, Poetry Wholes, and Family Portraits, all of which are published by If P Then Q. Other works include: Dungeness Guillemot Press Landlines Pamenar Press and Pett Level Deaths of Workers... He also makes poetry objects such as Pharmacopoetics,...

I have to say that this ‘commission’, as it were, has been incredibly inspiring and at the same time mind numbing. I’ve never experienced anything like it before. What a trilogy! What I’ve attached here is a work in progress - god knows how it will finally turn out. My images I’ve made sway into three camps: The paintings are closer to the books. The drawings are more flights of fancy. Some of these pieces are high camp, they have a pantomime feel, a burlesque commedia dell’arte, shlock horror X-ray type feel. Though the subject matter covers many things in my oeuvre I feel I could spend the rest of my living days making images inspired directly and indirectly by The Divine Comedy. I could develop these ideas by progressing to a much bigger scale or by means of the...

                    Images are paper collage on Hahnemuhle bamboo paper. Various sizes (overall paper size 30 x 32cm). All the images are from old copies of the Royal Meteorological Society ‘Weather’ magazine.   Rebecca Chesney’s practice examines our complex relationship with the natural world, by engaging with issues of culture, politics and power. Looking at our impact on the living planet, her artworks take the form of installations, interventions, collage, maps and walks. http://www.rebeccachesney.com   Click here to go back to: Contributors and Links to Pages 1 - 4