Glyn Hughes 1931 - 2014

281 Turkish Cypriots. Christian and Islam. Many are secular souls. They all seem to wish to become European. For the Toller imagery I wished to see further. Further into dreams, spaces, and time. Travelling helped. Cairo, Egypt. At a pyramid, the dark cell deep inside for a burial was reached by an umbilical cord of a tunnel winding into the navel of the huge building. A private room for the solitary dead. Built by hundreds of workers, who also died and were forgotten. That tunnel for them, as in Toller’s play, could have been a damp, cold, and dangerous mine. A treadmill of humiliation and suffering. Aleppo, Syria. Ancient slabs for sacrifices with neat channels for blood and the stone a gentle green. In Nicosia. Prisoners performing a Brecht play. Some of the actors had murdered. The audience were prisoners too. In an “outside” performance, the actor prisoners rushed around the theatre, carrying placards for free- dom. Freedom within the play. They stayed within the play, later going home to the prison in a bus. The Cyprus mountains. A wooden carving was given to me thirty years ago. Found by a friend, who said it had been carved by an EOKA man of the anti-colonial fighters of the 1955- 1959 uprising and left in the Kyrenia hills. The Easter Island-like head, which had a smile on its face, was set in the womb of a tree branch, which served as a stand and an ashtray with an icon penned on in biro. Made of the wood of arbutus, whose surface has the silky texture of skin and whose bark is pink. “My love’s an arbutus”, wrote Shakespeare. The wood head was like a mask. Nicosia. In the city streets there were old people carrying boxes marked “fragile” trying to get across the traffic. They wore traditional clothes of black. They could have been shadows. Shapes culled from half-forgotten dreams to become abstract forms or figures flying over the landscape, hanging on wires, walking towards the audience. I thought of slag heaps sodden with rain sliding over a school in Aberfan, Wales. 1 The School children drowned in the debris of what their grandfathers had dug from the coal mines. What landscape would surround the cast and audience? Can it be human? What would be the backbone of the play, the river of time passing through? Could not hills and fields rest on Sonja herself. There are magnificent casts for sculpture for the Henri Matisse backs at the little museum of Matisse in northern France. I laid sixteen abstract and reconstructed painted versions of these in reclining positions right along the backcloth for sixty metres. They would not be recognized as the female Matisse, but the newly created forms, crevices, mounds, and cracks would be the foundation of Sonja’s background. A pastoral dream. Only a dream. A dream of childhood before the big- city reality. Following through the whole series would be the spinal cord, streaming and continuing in different guises from blood to stock-market charts. Then collages in paint, wedged into the forms of reclining female backs for the artistic reality of the play. The sacrificial slabs pouring out humans into the gutters. The window eyes of prisons, the distorted human forms, dreams, the exaggerated masks, the beasts early waking, the weapons of war from any period in history. The small windows of large buildings in big cities and white nebula ghosts encased in transparent casks as if a crazed embryologist had drunk from the womb. 1 The Aberfan disaster was a catastrophic collapse of a colliery spoil tip in the Welsh village of Aberfan, on 21 October 1966, which killed 116 children and 28 adults. It was caused by a build-up of water in the accumulated rock and shale, which suddenly started to slide downhill in the form of slurry.