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Visionary Art

Independent cultural review · Gallery in Ruthin, Wales

Author: VisionaryArt

  • Tracey Emin at the Tate Modern

    Tracey Emin at the Tate Modern

    By Sarah Johnson

    Tracey Emin is taking up space at the Tate Modern until August. “A Second Life”. You walk in fully prepared to roll your eyes at the neon words and the messy beds.

    You don’t.

    She lived through cancer. She survived it. That brutal, ugly medical fact hangs over the entire show. It changes the gravity of the room. It makes the older pieces look completely different. Less like teenage screaming and more like someone fighting a very long war against her own body.

    It physically hurts to look at some of it. The vulnerability is just entirely aggressive. You want to look away. Which basically means it works. She is still here. She won.

  • It Feels Good to Be Lost in the Right Direction

    It Feels Good to Be Lost in the Right Direction

    By Sarah Johnson

    Every artist’s biography contains a stretch that looks, in summary, like failure: the years of false starts, abandoned series, work that went nowhere. We tend to read past these passages quickly, impatient for the breakthrough. But ask the artists themselves and they will often describe those years as the most important — the period when they were lost, and learning, in the right direction.

    There is a difference between being lost and being adrift. Adrift is passive; you go where the current takes you. Lost in the right direction is active — you are moving, testing, eliminating, even if you cannot yet name the destination. The novelist E.L. Doctorow described writing as “driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” The fog is not an obstacle to the journey. It is the condition of the journey.

    This is uncomfortable advice in a culture that prizes the clear plan and the measurable milestone. We are encouraged to set goals, define outcomes, work backward from a known result. But genuine creative work rarely cooperates. The painter does not know what the painting wants to be until it is half-finished and arguing back. The most a serious maker can do is choose a direction that feels true and trust the process to clarify it — to be lost, but lost toward something.

    What distinguishes productive lostness from mere confusion is attention. The wanderer who notices — who keeps a sketchbook, who pays attention to what excites and what bores them, who treats every dead end as information — is quietly building a map even while feeling map-less. The work of those years is not wasted motion; it is the slow accumulation of a sensibility. By the time the direction becomes clear, the artist has already become the person capable of going there.

    There is even a kind of pleasure in it, once the fear subsides. Certainty closes doors; being lost keeps them open. The period before you know what you are doing is the only period in which anything is still possible. Some artists chase that feeling for their whole lives, abandoning each style the moment it hardens into a formula, choosing the discomfort of the unknown over the safety of the mastered.

    The phrase is worth keeping close on the difficult days. Not every wrong turn is a mistake. Sometimes the disorientation is the sign that you have left the well-trodden path — which is, after all, the only place the new thing could possibly be. It feels good to be lost, when you are lost in the right direction.

  • The Art of the Decisive Moment: Why Sport Belongs in the Gallery

    The Art of the Decisive Moment: Why Sport Belongs in the Gallery

    By VisionaryArt Editorial

    A volleyball match lasts a couple of hours and is decided in fractions of a second — the instant a spiker’s hand meets the ball, the split moment a defender reads a feint and throws their body across the floor. To the spectator it is sport. To the photographer it is something else: a relentless supply of the “decisive moment,” the alignment of form and tension that the visual arts have chased for centuries.

    We do not usually file sport under art, but the boundary is thinner than it looks. The ancient Greeks built their entire sculptural ideal around the athletic body — the Discobolus freezes a discus thrower at the coiled top of his motion, a marble photograph taken two and a half thousand years before the camera. The Renaissance studied the same thing under the name of contrapposto: weight, balance, the body caught between intentions. What sport offers the image-maker is the human form pushed to its expressive extreme, and artists have never been able to leave that alone.

    Modern sports photography is the direct heir to this lineage. The greatest practitioners — Neil Leifer, whose overhead frame of Ali standing over Liston is one of the most reproduced images of the twentieth century; the agency photographers who can pre-visualise a leap before it happens — are not merely documentarians. They compose. They anticipate. They understand that a picture of a rally is not about who won the point but about geometry, suspension and effort made visible. The ball frozen above the net, six bodies arranged in a diagonal of strain, is a study in dynamic balance that any figurative painter would recognise.

    There is also the matter of emotion. Sport strips feeling of its usual disguises. Triumph, collapse, disbelief and exhaustion arrive raw and unguarded, and the camera collects them. The best sports images outlive the result they record precisely because they stop being about the scoreline. Nobody remembers the final tally of most historic matches; everyone remembers the face.

    This is why galleries and museums increasingly make room for the genre, and why the line between the sports desk and the art world keeps blurring. A frame from a single international fixture, properly seen, contains the same ingredients as a history painting: bodies in space, a moment of maximum tension, a story compressed into stillness.

    The next time a rally ends in a blur of limbs and a held breath, look past the result. Somewhere in that instant a photographer is doing what sculptors and painters have always done — arresting the human body at the height of its eloquence, and handing it to us to keep.

  • Beyond Borders: Visionary Art Gallery Brings ‘Trajectories of Life’ to London

    Beyond Borders: Visionary Art Gallery Brings ‘Trajectories of Life’ to London

    By Sarah Johnson

    London Calling: A Convergence of Motion and Spirit

    This February, Visionary Art Gallery (Ruthin, Wales) is proud to announce a landmark collaboration with London’s AMOVE Gallery (Romford, London). Together, we present “Trajectories of Life: Art in Motion”, a curated exploration of how we move through the physical world and how the spirit traverses the metaphysical.

    Art is never static; it is a living, breathing entity that evolves with time. In keeping with our mission to showcase art that transcends the ordinary, we are thrilled to bring our curated selection to the heart of London at the historic St. Margaret’s House.

    A Curatorial Dialogue: Wales Meets London
    This exhibition represents more than just a display of works; it is a strategic and creative dialogue between two cultural hubs. Under the expert guidance of Curator Irina Bogatikova, by joining forces with AMOVE Gallery, we are bridging the distance between the serene landscapes of Wales and the dynamic urban pulse of London.

    The concept of “Trajectories of Life” delves into the philosophical triad of Meaning, Beauty, and Time. It asks a poignant question relevant to every viewer: where are we going today, and what do we choose to take with us?

    The Texture of Time
    Visitors to St. Margaret’s House will be invited to explore parallel realms. The exhibition contrasts the tangible—the hustle of city streets, the architecture of civilization—with the intangible flight of the human spirit.

    We explore time not as a linear constraint, but as a textured material:

    • Frozen within the rigid lines of architectural forms.
    • Fluid and alive in the thick, expressive impasto of painting.
    • Eternal in the contemplation of nature and the future.

    Selected Highlights
    The exhibition features a compelling roster of artists whose work embodies the theme of motion, bridging the gap between emerging and established voices. Highlights include:

    • Victoria Chichinadze: Her bronze sculpture, River of Time, anchors the exhibition, offering a solid, tactile representation of the ephemeral nature of our days.
    • Zibeyda Seyidova: The Breath of the Hidden series invites viewers to look beyond the veil of reality into the mysteries of the subconscious, playing masterfully with light and shadow.
    • Natrix Vibakari: With the Inner Demons series, we confront the internal motions of the psyche—the intimate battles and spiritual movements that happen within us.
    • Art Liard: Her series Chronicles of Matter invites viewers to contemplate the delicate, transient beauty of nature, captured through the exquisite, layered depiction of a rose suspended in time.
    • Tatiana Kiseleva: In Water, Kiseleva masterfully captures the dynamic, bubbling fluidity of the elements through rich, deeply textured oceanic hues.
    • Nataliia Pivovarova: Her piece Butterfly captures the essence of transformation and the fleeting beauty of the present moment in a burst of vibrant watercolor.
    • Irinir: Pink Desire offers a deeply textural, visceral exploration of emotion, bringing raw feeling to the surface of the canvas.
    • Katerina Bogina: Who is in charge? presents a striking existential tableau, contrasting human silhouettes against a blazing, monumental sun to question our place in the universe.
    • Kate Karp: With Sanguine Observer, Karp utilizes striking, thick impasto to create a piercing red eye that actively watches the viewer, blurring the line between the observer and the observed.
    • Yulia Tulegenova: Oh, My Heart translates the passionate, rhythmic beating of life into a vortex of thick, expressive reds and pinks.
    • Egor Koltsov: The First Imprint playfully examines the timeline of human creativity, juxtaposing a stylized modern perspective with ancient cave paintings to explore how art moves through millennia.
    • Maria Babina: Schism and Synthesis explores duality and conflict, visually splitting the canvas between stark black and white, united only by a chaotic, textured burst of red.
    • Anastasiia Belyaeva: Her Abstraction evokes the swirling, untamed currents of nature, weaving deep, kinetic blues with brilliant metallic golds.
    • Anna Kapranchuk: My Friend Has a Dream About… pulls the audience into a surreal, mixed-media dreamscape that traverses the deep recesses of memory and the human subconscious.

    Join Us at the Opening
    We invite our patrons, collectors, and friends of the gallery to join us for this special event. This is an opportunity to witness the synergy of two galleries committed to moving ideas and culture across borders.

    Event Details:

    • Exhibition: Trajectories of Life: Art in Motion
    • Private View: 21 February 2026 | 18:00 – 21:00 (RSVP Only)
    • Opening: 22 February 2026 | 12:00 – 20:00
    • Venue: St. Margaret’s House, 21 Old Ford Road, London, E2 9PL
    • Admission: Free entry

    For full catalogue enquiries or to RSVP for the private view, please contact us at [email protected] or visit our partner site amovegallery.com.

    Visionary Art Gallery — connecting the visionary with the world.

  • Stiwdio Clwyd: A New Anchor for Welsh Creative Talent

    Stiwdio Clwyd: A New Anchor for Welsh Creative Talent

    The landscape of Welsh theatre has shifted significantly this week with Theatr Clwyd’s unveiling of Stiwdio Clwyd, a major new infrastructure project designed to incubate talent within Wales rather than seeing it drain away to London or Manchester. Artistic Director Kate Wasserberg and Executive Director Liam Evans-Ford have positioned this not merely as a workshop series, but as a “watershed moment”—a systemic change in how the nation nurtures its storytellers.

    Breaking the Exodus Cycle

    For decades, a common grievance in the Welsh arts sector has been the necessity of leaving the country to secure high-level development opportunities. Stiwdio Clwyd aims to arrest this exodus by establishing a permanent, nationwide development hub. By formalizing this support structure, Theatr Clwyd is asserting itself as a powerhouse for R&D (Research and Development), ensuring that Welsh voices have the resources to refine their craft on home soil before exporting their work globally.

    Heavy Hitters at the Helm

    The seriousness of this endeavor is underscored by the caliber of industry titans attached to the launch programme. The inclusion of Russell T Davies—perhaps the most significant voice in British television drama—signals that this scheme bridges the gap between stage and screen writing. Furthermore, the involvement of Daniel Evans, Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (and a Rhondda native), provides a direct lineage to the highest echelons of classical and contemporary theatre.

    The Programmatic Scope

    While specific curriculum details will evolve, the launch emphasizes three core pillars:

    • Skill Transfer: Direct mentorship from established icons like Davies and Evans.
    • Networking: Connecting emerging Welsh makers with the broader UK industry without requiring relocation.
    • Production Pathways: Creating tangible routes for developed scripts and concepts to reach the stage.

    This initiative suggests that Theatr Clwyd is moving beyond the remit of a producing house to become a foundational institution for the entire Welsh cultural ecology. If successful, Stiwdio Clwyd could serve as the blueprint for regional arts regeneration across the UK.

  • For a Game, You Don’t Need a Teacher

    For a Game, You Don’t Need a Teacher

    By VisionaryArt Editorial

    Children learn to play without a syllabus. Nobody teaches a four-year-old how to build a world out of cardboard and conviction; the rules emerge from the doing, revised on the spot whenever they stop being fun. The psychologist Donald Winnicott argued that this kind of free play is not a rehearsal for creativity but creativity itself — the place where the self first discovers it can make something that did not exist before.

    Artists have always known this, even when the art world forgot it. The Surrealists built entire methods out of play: exquisite corpse, automatic drawing, games designed to outwit the controlling mind. Paul Klee described drawing as “taking a line for a walk.” Bauhaus students spent their first months not on technique but on experiment — touching materials, testing what paper and wire and light would do, before anyone told them what they were supposed to make. The instruction came later, once curiosity had done the foundational work.

    The phrase “for a game, you don’t need a teacher” is not an argument against teaching. It is an argument about sequence. Skill can be taught; the appetite to use it cannot. A student handed technique before desire produces competent, lifeless work — the visual equivalent of grammar with nothing to say. A student who has first played, failed, and become genuinely curious will absorb technique hungrily, because now it answers a question they actually have.

    This has practical consequences for anyone trying to make things. The blank canvas is intimidating precisely because it feels like an exam. Reframed as a game — low stakes, no grade, permission to be ridiculous — it becomes approachable again. Many working artists protect a corner of their practice that stays deliberately unserious: sketchbooks no one will see, experiments with no commercial purpose, materials used wrongly on purpose. That corner is where the next real idea usually arrives, smuggled in under the cover of play.

    The teacher, when they come, is best understood as someone who clears obstacles and points at doors — not someone who hands over a map. The territory still has to be explored on foot, and the explorer has to want to go. Mastery is downstream of motivation, and motivation, more often than not, begins as a game.

    So before the lessons, before the rules, before the anxious question of whether you are doing it correctly: play. The work that matters tends to start there, in the place that needs no teacher at all.

  • Your First 10,000 Photographs Are Your Worst

    Your First 10,000 Photographs Are Your Worst

    By Sarah Johnson

    The line is usually attributed to Henri Cartier-Bresson: “Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” Whether he said it exactly that way is disputed — the sentiment has been claimed for several photographers — but its endurance suggests it touches something true. Mastery in photography is not won at the moment of purchase. It is accumulated, frame by mediocre frame, over years.

    What makes the early thousands so poor is rarely the equipment. It is the eye. A beginner photographs the thing that excited them — a sunset, a face, a street — and is disappointed to find the picture flat, because the camera recorded the scene but not the feeling. The feeling lived in context: the temperature of the air, the sound, the anticipation. Photography’s hardest lesson is that none of that transmits automatically. It must be built into the frame deliberately, through composition, timing, light and exclusion.

    Cartier-Bresson’s own answer was the “decisive moment” — the instant when form and content align, when the geometry of a scene and its human meaning lock into place for a fraction of a second. He waited for it with a patience that looks, in retrospect, almost devotional. He shot far less than people assume; his genius was in seeing, and the camera merely confirmed what the eye had already chosen.

    This is why the digital era, for all its gifts, complicates the apprenticeship. When film cost money and frames were finite, every exposure carried a small tax that forced deliberation. Now we shoot freely, and the 10,000 bad photographs arrive in a weekend rather than a decade. The volume is not the problem; the absence of consequence is. Photographers who improve fastest tend to impose their own scarcity — a single lens, a fixed focal length, a self-imposed limit of thirty-six frames a day — recreating the friction that teaches.

    The encouraging part of the maxim is its second clause, usually left unspoken: after the first 10,000, something shifts. The eye begins to anticipate. You stop photographing what is in front of you and start photographing what a picture of it could become. The failures were not wasted; they were the curriculum.

    So the advice to any beginner is unromantic but liberating: make the bad pictures, all of them, as quickly and as attentively as you can. Look hard at why they fail. The worst photographs you will ever take are the ones standing between you and the ones worth keeping — and the only way past them is through.

  • The Leonie Cassel Question: An Inheritance of Monica Bellucci 

    The Leonie Cassel Question: An Inheritance of Monica Bellucci 

    By Sara Johnson

    In the sprawling, often cacophonous theatre of celebrity lineage, some figures are defined not by their presence, but by a carefully guarded absence. For years, Léonie Cassel has been such a figure. She exists in the public imagination as a constellation of powerful names: the daughter of Monica Bellucci, a woman whose beauty became a kind of cultural shorthand for Italian sensuality, and Vincent Cassel, an actor synonymous with a raw, almost feral French intensity. While her older sister, Deva, has seamlessly transitioned from scion to star, gracing magazine covers as a near-perfect echo of her mother, Léonie has remained a study in quietude.

    But silence, in the world of fame, has a sound all its own. It builds anticipation. Now a teenager, the younger Cassel is emerging from the carefully constructed privacy that has defined her life, and the world is beginning to realise that she may not be an echo at all, but a new and distinct voice.

    A Fortress of Normalcy

    To understand Léonie, one must first understand the world she was shielded from. Born in Rome in 2010, she entered a dynasty already at its zenith. The union of Bellucci and Cassel was more than a marriage; it was a cinematic event, a fusion of two distinct European energies. Deva had arrived six years earlier, and with Léonie’s birth, Bellucci made a conscious, almost radical choice. She pulled back from her career. “It was a precise choice,” she would later explain. “When I had the children I worked much less… it was a necessary need for me.”

    This act of maternal preservation shaped Léonie’s formative years. Raised between Paris and Rome, she became a child of two cultures, fluently bilingual, yet fundamentally protected from the relentless glare that had defined her parents’ lives. Their focus was on preserving the fragile ecosystem of childhood. While the machinery of fame whirred around them, the Cassel household became a fortress of normalcy, a space where the rhythm of school and family life took precedence over red carpets and photo calls.

    A Different Reflection

    For a long time, the public narrative of Léonie Cassel was built from stolen moments—grainy paparazzi images of a young girl in Milan, or a fleeting glimpse during a family dinner in Bellagio. From these fragments, a story began to take shape. Where Deva was a startling mirror of her mother—the same dark, wavy hair, the magnetic gaze—Léonie presented a different genetic algorithm.

    Observers noted a lighter colouring, a certain Nordic quality that seemed to favour her father’s side of the family. There were whispers of a resemblance to her paternal aunt, Cécile Cassel, an actress and singer. This is the crude, almost forensic, way the world assesses the children of the beautiful, but it pointed towards a more profound truth: Léonie was her own person, not a carbon copy. Her beauty wasn’t a direct inheritance, but a synthesis, hinting at the edgy, unconventional appeal that has long been a Cassel trademark.

    This distinction is crucial. Deva’s entry into the world of high fashion felt almost inevitable, a logical continuation of the Bellucci legacy. For Léonie, the path is less clear, and therefore, infinitely more intriguing. She remains a schoolgirl, her life reportedly grounded in academics. That quiet cultivation of an inner world, away from the demands of public performance, might just be the most potent advantage she possesses.

    The Weight and Wings of a Name

    Of course, no amount of protection can entirely erase the legacy of a name like Cassel. It is a lineage that stretches back to her grandfather, the celebrated French actor Jean-Pierre Cassel. To be born into it is to inherit a world of art, cinema, and an inescapable public curiosity. The challenge is to turn that weight into wings.

    The family structure has also evolved. The end of Bellucci and Cassel’s marriage in 2013 was navigated with a quiet dignity, a conscious effort to shield their daughters from the public fallout. Vincent Cassel’s subsequent relationships have brought two more children into the fold—a half-sister, Amazonie, with Tina Kunakey, and a son born in early 2025 with Nara Baptista. This modern, blended family adds another layer of complexity to Léonie’s world, yet the core parental unit, in terms of devotion, appears to remain unshaken.

    Bellucci has often spoken of her daughters in almost reverential terms. “My daughters are my wings,” she has declared, framing motherhood not as a role she played, but as the very essence of her being. “They are the answers to all my questions. It was when they were born that I understood my reason for being on this Earth.” This profound sense of purpose has undoubtedly been the anchor for both Deva and Léonie.

    Perhaps the most compelling part of Léonie Cassel’s story is what is yet to be written. She is coming of age at a time when fame is often instant and superficial, built on the fleeting currency of social media. Her curated absence feels like an act of defiance. It suggests a substance, a depth, that cannot be captured in a passing photograph. The whispers from the fashion world persist, suggesting her unique look could be a powerful force, but whether she chooses to step into that arena remains her decision.

    Léonie Cassel is no longer just a name in the shadow of giants. She is a young woman on the cusp of defining her own narrative. The world watches, intrigued by the quiet fire it senses behind the veil of privacy. But one gets the feeling she will speak only when she has something to say, and on her own terms. The silence, it turns out, was just the prelude.

  • North Wales cultural landmark receives funding

    North Wales cultural landmark receives funding

    By Sarah Johnson

    There is a particular silence that hangs over the slate quarries of North Wales. It is not the gentle quiet of an untouched wilderness. It is a heavy, deep silence, weighted with the ghosts of noise: the sharp crack of splitting rock, the rumble of wagons on iron rails, the distant shouts of men, and the relentless, percussive tapping of a thousand hammers and chisels. Stand on the edge of the great, man-made canyon of Dinorwic, and you are standing on the edge of a void, both physical and historical. This landscape was not born; it was violently made. And for generations, it unmade the men who worked it.

    Into this silence, the Welsh Government has spoken. An investment of £3.3 million has been directed to the National Slate Museum in Llanberis, the institution charged with keeping this story alive. The funding is earmarked for redevelopment: a new learning centre, better access, refreshed exhibitions. On the surface, it is a piece of practical, administrative news. But its real significance is profound. This is more than an upgrade to a tourist facility. It is a down payment on a debt of memory, a crucial act of cultural preservation for an industry that roofed the nineteenth-century world and, in doing so, forged a defining, brutal, and beautiful part of the Welsh identity.

    An Industry Etched in Grey

    To understand why this matters, one must understand slate. Not as a building material, but as a geological destiny. The Cambrian slate belt that runs through this part of Wales is a seam of compressed, fine-grained mudstone, possessing a unique quality: it cleaves, perfectly, into thin, durable sheets. For centuries, this “grey gold” was hacked from the hillsides on a small scale. Then the Industrial Revolution arrived, and the demand for roofing material exploded. Welsh slate became the default. It covered the factories of Manchester, the terrace houses of London, and the municipal buildings of the British Empire, from Melbourne to Montreal.

    The scale of the extraction was almost geological in itself. Mountains were hollowed out, terraced into vast, inverted ziggurats. Villages like Llanberis, Bethesda, and Blaenau Ffestiniog became company towns, their existence dictated by the rhythms of the quarry horn. The work was breathtakingly dangerous. Men and boys worked on narrow ledges, hundreds of feet in the air, in all weathers. Rockfalls were common. The air was thick with a fine, grey dust that settled in the lungs, leading to silicosis, the slow, suffocating quarryman’s disease.

    This brutal reality forged a unique and resilient culture. The quarrymen were not an amorphous labour force; they were a highly politicised, literate, and non-conformist community. Inside the quarry, they worked in small, cooperative teams. During their lunch breaks, they gathered in stone huts known as cabans. These were not mere mess rooms. They were informal parliaments, debating chambers, and universities of the working man. Here, in the Welsh language, they discussed politics, theology, and poetry. They organised unions and chapels. They orchestrated some of the longest and most bitter industrial disputes in British history, most famously the Penrhyn Quarry strike, a three-year struggle for dignity and fair pay that tore the community apart.

    The slate industry was, in a very real sense, a crucible of modern Welsh identity. It was intensely Welsh-speaking, fiercely political, and deeply rooted in a specific, unforgiving landscape. To forget the story of slate would be to induce a form of national amnesia.

    More Than a Museum

    The National Slate Museum is the primary bulwark against this forgetting. Housed in the former Victorian engineering workshops of the Dinorwic Quarry, it is a remarkable place. It is not a sterile collection of artefacts behind glass. It is a living museum, where the air still smells of oil and steam. The great waterwheel, once the largest in Britain, still turns. Craftsmen give daily demonstrations of splitting slate, their hands moving with an inherited economy of movement, transforming a rough block into a perfect roofing slate with a few deft taps. To visit is to step directly into the world of the men who worked here.

    But time takes its toll on buildings, as it does on memory. The new funding, which brings the Welsh Government’s total contribution to £5.8 million, is designed to secure this legacy for a new generation. The planned redevelopment is about more than a new café and shop. It is about creating new spaces for learning, about offering training in the traditional heritage skills that are themselves an endangered craft, and about making the entire site more accessible, ensuring the story can be shared with everyone.

    When Culture Minister Jack Sargeant visited the site, he framed the investment as part of a wider commitment. He spoke of a “transformation journey,” connecting the work at Llanberis to the renewal of Theatr Clwyd and the creation of the new Football Museum in Wrexham. This is a crucial point. The investment is not an isolated act of generosity. It is part of a coherent strategy to strengthen Welsh culture by investing in the specific, local institutions that embody it. As the minister noted, this spending is “woven into budgets across Welsh Government,” from education to community regeneration. It is an acknowledgement that culture is not a luxury, but the very fabric of a healthy society.

    From Local Industry to Global Heritage

    The timing of this investment is significant. In 2021, the slate landscape of Northwest Wales was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. This placed it on a par with the Pyramids of Giza and the Great Wall of China. It was a moment of global recognition for the industry’s world-changing impact and the unique culture it fostered.

    Yet there is always a danger that a UNESCO badge can become a glossy sticker, a brand for tourism that papers over the complex, often painful, reality of a place. It can embalm a landscape, turning it into a static monument. This funding does the opposite. It ensures that the UNESCO designation is a living reality. It translates global prestige into local benefit, creating jobs, providing training, and strengthening the very community whose ancestors carved out the landscape being celebrated. It ensures the World Heritage site is not just a place to be looked at, but a place to be understood, engaged with, and learned from.

    Perhaps the most striking thing is how this project aims to reanimate the past. It seeks to do for the story of slate what the quarrymen did for the rock itself: to take something dense and seemingly impenetrable, and cleave it open, revealing the intricate layers within. By creating new learning spaces and offering training in heritage skills, the museum is not just preserving history; it is trying to create a dialogue with it. It is building a bridge between the silent, imposing quarries and the generations who will never hear the noise that once filled them.

    This work is a quiet act of defiance against the entropy of time. It is a declaration that this story—of hardship, of solidarity, of a language and a culture that survived against the odds—will not be allowed to fade into the grey silence of the hills. It is a promise to the ghosts of the quarrymen that their labour, and their lives, will be remembered.

  • Carys Davies’ Novel ‘Clear’ Wins Wales Book of the Year

    Carys Davies’ Novel ‘Clear’ Wins Wales Book of the Year

    Carys Davies has won the 2025 Wales Book of the Year award for her novel, Clear. The winner was revealed at a ceremony at Cardiff’s Sherman Theatre, hosted by Literature Wales.

    Davies receives a £4,000 prize and a trophy designed by the artist Angharad Pearce Jones. The book first won the Fiction Award before being named the overall English-language winner.

    A Story of Two Strangers

    Clear is set on a remote Scottish island in 1843. It tells the story of Ivar, the island’s only resident, who discovers a man washed up unconscious on the shore.

    The stranger is John Ferguson, a minister sent to evict Ivar and prepare the land for sheep grazing. Unaware of his guest’s purpose, Ivar cares for him, and the two men form a bond without a shared language.

    Carole Burns, speaking for the judges, explained their choice. “We all loved this book, for its story, for its ambition, for its sentences, for its relevance to our world today.” She added, “Excellence is always the only criteria, in the end, for a prize, and that’s true for this winning book.”

    Welsh-Language Prize Awarded for Memoir

    The overall Welsh-language Book of the Year was awarded to Iola Ynyr for Camu. Her book is a memoir told through a series of personal essays.

    In Camu, Ynyr writes about reclaiming her memories after losing periods of her life to alcoholism and trauma. It is described as her attempt to trust that she is safe by telling her own story.

    Category Winners for 2025

    The Wales Book of the Year award is given in four categories for both English and Welsh-language titles. Each category winner receives £1,000.

    English-Language Winners:

    • Poetry Award: Girls etc by Rhian Elizabeth
    • Creative Non-Fiction Award: Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling by Gwyneth Lewis
    • Children & Young People Award: A History of My Weird by Chloe Heuch
    • People’s Choice Award: Girls etc by Rhian Elizabeth

    Welsh-Language Winners:

    • Poetry Award: Rhuo ei distawrwydd hi by Meleri Davies
    • Fiction Award: V + Fo by Gwenno Gwilym
    • Children & Young People Award: Arwana Swtan a’r Sgodyn Od by Angie and Dyfan Roberts
    • People’s Choice Prize: V + Fo by Gwenno Gwilym