Newsletter #1

Croeso beautiful being to my newsletter intended to bring you moments of respite, reflection and upliftment.

In this first newsletter, it is my pleasure to share with you my latest work, Shimmering. 

Made during my four-day residency with multidisciplinary visual artist, filmmaker, and researcher Heledd Wyn, this piece weaves together ancestral history and lived experience through movement and sound; inspired by the natural landscape of Aberystwyth, West Wales, and a gold-sequinned dress which, I will admit, I donned with some reservation.

These misgivings were quickly superseded by several things. Firstly, there was the generously collaborative approach Heledd took to what I had assumed would be a purely tutorial exercise.

We talked about filmmaking, sketching vague lines for a storyboard. Then came a provocation drawn from the spiralling forms of nature.

A very organic, intuitive, and trusting process began—a melding of Heledd’s wizardry and my own sensing of an expression wanting to be brought forth through embodied movement. It was a timely opportunity to integrate the Golden Spiral homeopathic remedy I'd worked with some time ago and my recently acquired Qigong silk-reeling movements, balancing yin with yang.

At the same time, the dress - seen for what it was, a prop- stirred a deeper knowing within me: that, as time passes and all things change, my expansion demands the suspension of judgment and an embrace of the now; acknowledging, accepting, and honouring that which was is no more; appreciating what is; letting go of taboos, imperfections and self- censorship handed down through generations.

I’ve always had an affinity with the sea and refer to it

in this piece as Kala Pani or 'black water' (mispronounced as my Gujarati often is)

An Ismaili waez (religious scholar), rather than a historian, suggested that this was a name given to the dangerous seas off the coast of Gujarat where many perished on their way to East Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Frustratingly, my research could not confirm this. Instead, I discovered that its meaning relates to religious taboos and indentured labour (kala pani), revealing the interconnected histories of Hinduism, its influence on Indian culture despite the country's religious diversity, the Indian diaspora and colonialism.

Miraculously, on this occasion - perhaps the result of a shift in compass from south to west and working alongside a creative kindred spirit - I found middle-aged me singing for life, moving freely on a beach by the sea, wearing a gold-sequinned dress: a conduit for joy, shimmering in the light.

Thanks to Arts Council Wales for their continued support and for helping me realise this newsletter through Creative Steps funding, diolch yn fawr.