Elizabeth Tomos (2022) Hiraeth: an ode to (be)longing. [Perform//Print]
The photograph was taken by Stephen Godfrey at the inaugural performance at Trans- States: The Art of Deception.
Elizabeth Tomos (2022) Hiraeth: an ode to (be)longing. [Perform//Print]
Edited highlights of the inaugural performance at Trans- States: The Art of Deception.
Credits:
Artist: Elizabeth Tomos
Lighting: Alex Bass
Photography: Stephen Godfrey
Music: Sadgrove Music
Camera: Carly Daniel, Laura Stewart, Crystal Walker-Spring, Vyom Chhaya, and Kim Barber
Post-production: Joe Brown and Elizabeth Tomos
With enormous thanks to Trans- States media and Cavan McLaughlin
Hiraeth: an ode to (be)longing.
What stories do stones tell? There is an African proverb that “Mountains don’t meet, people do”, but if stones do meet each other from different places, countries or even continents what passes between them? What languages do they speak? How do they converse with each other? Do they experience longing for home when they are separated from their homelands? What do the stones yearn for? What do they remember? What are their desires? What gifts does displacement from their homeland give them? Does being displaced from a sense of ‘home’ give the stones access to something they might never otherwise have had? Or more bleakly, in what ways are the stones suffering from this separation? What opportunities have been stolen? Can we, the stones and me, be in communion with one another in our displacement, and longing, and searching for home? In suffering are we perhaps kin? Can we be portals for one another to transform ourselves and each other, to take us to other places and other realms? And if so, what would any of that mean?
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This work was first performed at Trans- States: The Art of Deception conference at the University of Northampton in September 2022 and then screened for the Women Who Create conference in Cambridge in March 2023 and for the Performance Studies International (PSi) conference in Joburg, South Africa in August 2023.
The performance is a direct exploration of my nomadic life and fragmented cultural heritage. I grew up with family stories of my Welsh lineage, which can be traced back as far back as there is written record, and of their migration, alongside much of the community, to Portsmouth (England) following the closure of Pembrokeshire Docks where my great-grandfather worked. Facing the loss of his livelihood, he had little choice but to agree to move and the family went with him. Clinging desperately and hopelessly to the vestiges of our Welsh culture it slowly died, cut off from the land to which we had belonged for centuries. I was born elsewhere, a wanderer, a traveller, of no fixed abode, moving across two continents and multiple countries. I was born in an English town we were merely passing through on the way from South Africa to North America and was then raised across two continents, North America, and Europe. As a result, my relationship with the concept of home and belonging is somewhat fragmented. This work addresses my longing for a sense of home, a feeling of belonging, and for knowledge or connection to my ancestors and ancestral lands from which I was cut off.
The performance uses stones gathered or given to me from my wanderings, throughout the performance, they are ritually washed, massaged with oil, and coated in fine layers of graphite, charcoal, and coal dust, to be then used as printmaking tools. A meditative act on journeying, on place, on land, home, and belonging.
The work has also been based on an increasing desire to return to my ancestral heritage to navigate making artwork about the ecological crisis. Welsh mythology and literature, such as The Mabinogion a collection of medieval Welsh stories, reveal the deep and poignant understanding of the relationship between the land and the beings that inhabit it. Many characters are transformed into or fashioned from the land, or into animals and birds. The land has a vitalism and magic that permeates all experiences. Features of the landscape such as stones, pools, water, and caves become portals for transformation, acting as liminal spaces between the spiritual or magical realm and our world. Little to no distinction is made between the body and the ecology to which it belongs. Indeed, the Welsh word, Hiraeth, carries deep cultural significance through the Welsh framing of connectivity to the land, akin to blood running through veins, that results in a deep longing when separated from the land. In times of great ecological crisis, these kinds of ancestral understandings of the land and its importance to the human spirit become especially poignant and critical.
