Jeane Fabb
Dwin mynd I cae nos… / Going to the field of night…- Installation
This building was where mules had walked endlessly round and round pulling the stones that ground bones into bonemeal—a fertiliser to be thrown back into the earth. It was not so much this story that drew me here, but more the feeling of being indoors and outdoors simultaneously in this old stone-walled space with no roof, windows or door. Here, I was reminded of something about our journey, a sensation of travelling in two directions at once—inwards towards a deepening unconscious space, and outwards into a strong sensual collective experience of land.
Over the previous two weeks, fragments of myths and stories permeating the land we walked daily would surface nightly in my sleep—blue sheep, indecisive giants, fairyfood and eggshells, giantesses hurling stones, a black boar, King Arthur ringed by stones, glaciers and bluestones in slow dance, a comb and scissors perched between ears, a man with long white hair and beard disintegrating, a father giant dying of heartbreak, untamed oaks and bleeding yews gesturing, and on and on. One night I dreamt that I was pulled by the feet through a grid of darkness over the edge of the land, into an underground space full of gnarly tree roots, into another kind of knowing, where the wakeful state of walking the land was transformed into a dreamspace of its ambient myths.
Musing upon these images, I swept the ground inside the bonehouse (as everyone called it) and laid down meandering patterns of stones, like unfinished paths. I then made a giant bed in the centre using broken slate (that had formerly been the roof of the building) for the legs, and a large abandoned gate covered with layers of organic materials—hay, oak leaves and bluebells—for the mattress. In the cracks in the walls I put sheep bones, stones and bluebells I’d gathered in the Preselis. And in the window openings, I placed book forms made from roof slate—yes, so much more to learn here. On the open day, lying very still on the bed, horizontal with the land, completely covered in blue muslin, eyes open watching the sky, I listened to the stories as people milled around and round the bed.
The title of the work was suggested by Simon – a Welsh saying, he told me, that is uttered before going to sleep.