major retrospective Works by Welsh-born artist Gwen John: Strange beauties The exhibition, held at Cardiff National Museum in the first half of 2026, brought together rarely seen works from the archives of Cardiff National Museum and galleries around the world. In his detailed and wide-ranging essay in O’r Pedwar Gwynt (Wales), Mark Edwards asks readers to consider John’s thoughts. the work from many angles. Edwards questions the tendency of curators to “lift” the artist as a “feminist icon”, suggesting that she was a much more complex character than such a label would allow.
On the one hand, John was fiercely independent, made his art the center of his world, and rejected marriage and children. She was one of the first women to train at the Slade School of Art in London. Her female image refuses objectification. John, on the other hand, was tightly attached to her brother Augustus John and, according to Edwards, was effectively enslaved by the sculptor Auguste Rodin, who used her emotionally, sexually, and artistically. She was also financially dependent on him.
The Musée Rodin in Paris has approximately 2,000 letters from John to Rodin. We need to consider the “dark possibility” that “her relationship with Rodin was necessary to her genius,” says Edwards. The artist is driven by conflicting passions: for art, for erotic love (between a man and a woman), and for God. These contradictions result in transcendental portraits of women, often protected by curtains or layers of clothing.
Was Gwen John a Welsh artist, British or European? While the Welsh art world is certainly enthusiastic about her claims, art historian Peter Lord remains skeptical. John never engaged emotionally or intellectually with Wales, but he also never fully immersed himself in his French identity. Edwards believes that ultimately, “for Gwen John, the work was everything, it was art without boundaries.”
fictional wales
While vacationing in La Rochelle, Mererid Pugh-Davies comes across a travel article about Wales written by a French author. The artist expresses the feeling of loneliness of being on the edge of the world. This is a well-known metaphor in literature. Wales is often described as devoid of people, or ‘blank space’. Ironically, this travel piece is about Swansea, a densely populated city. “Can’t we see what we’re trying to see?” Davis asks.
She quotes literary scholar Christina Les, who has studied representations of Wales in European texts. place Therefore, it seems to be a gateway to some kind of existence. space, It is characterized by otherness, liminality, and distance. Fictional characters often try to escape from crisis. They become blind to the world around them and are surrounded by pain. This also applies to the main character. und jeden morgen das meer (“And Every Morning by the Sea”) (2018) Written by Karl Heinz Ott. In this novel, Aberystwyth is reimagined as ‘Avidil’, a desolate place seen through the eyes of a grieving widow.
lose yourself Genre In German literature, especially romance novels set in Wales, Pugh Davis encountered a completely different country full of people and warmth. The protagonists fall in love with people who care about “nature, humans, and animals.” These popular stories are full of delicious food, hospitality, and traumatic past events. They offer a brighter vision of Wales. Although they do not provide a completely accurate representation, the author would rather live in this world than in the loveless desert of Abidil.
tourism and science fiction
Mary Ann Constantine is on a day trip to Scotland’s Loch Katrine, perhaps the birthplace of Scottish tourism. She considers the influence of Sir Walter Scott and his long poem ‘The Lady of the Lake’ on the development of the tourism industry here. Like Davis, she acknowledges that such places are “a curious mixture of fact and fantasy.” Magical landscapes like this tend to generate creative works that shape the way you experience the place.
Lake Katrine had a profound influence on Jules Verne, who visited in 1859. Constantine finds one of his novels in a gift shop. underground city, translated from Les India Noirs (1877). She read this book during a long train journey and was fascinated. Verne describes an underground world built beneath a lake to exploit coal seams, which “reflects and critiques life above ground.”
In this world, workers are happy and safe from the storms of the world. This is a “capitalist fantasy” by an author who subscribes to society’s utopian ideas of progress, technology, and an obedient workforce.
The field of energy research is growing in response to the environmental crisis. In his recent work, Constantine examines the debate in the history of coal and reminds us of its relevance to our lives today. “We can never be in the heat of the moment,” she reminds us, quoting scholar and activist Andreas Malm. We can only be in “an ongoing fever of the past.”
trauma and trouble
The author, Mr. Liadhan Nie Chuyin, everyone is still here (2025) is a non-binary writer from Belfast who publishes under a pen name. They were born in 1998, the year of the Good Friday Agreement, and are too young to remember bombs, murders and kidnappings. But this story lives on in people’s consciousness, Angarad Penryn Jones.
This “remarkable” debut collection of short stories examines questions of intergenerational trauma, grief, silence, and the act of naming. His unflinching chronicle of crimes committed by British soldiers in Northern Ireland caused a stir in the literary world.
Jones contextualizes the work within a postcolonial framework. All of these characters grapple with the question of what it means to live in a violent and exploitative world. The author’s anger seems to pulse through the pages. Jones said the text “raises moral questions about guilt and complicity, implying that each of us is tainted by having committed a crime or by refusing to prevent a crime from occurring.”
Source: Eurozine – www.eurozine.com
