More than geographic, the site referenced in the title (what three words) is a tether to a particular time, place and culture.
There is a cemetery on the side of the Garw Valley, part of the carboniferous South Wales coalfield that I have been working in since 2022. Above that, with nothing between, is a soft shaped mound. Tired of the darkness of the valley, I walked to the top. Instead of green softness I found rocky outcrops – unforgiving and difficult to walk on. As I connected with these rigid structures, I noticed the colour and smell of the lively world between them. Bending around the gnarly forms, pushing limbs into crevices, the strange shaped gaps offered other spaces to occupy and make tangible, visible.
The act of stone and molten glass meeting each other is at once violent and intimate; a negotiation between elements with deep and complex histories. These moments of shattering, oozing, resisting, absorbing, speak to wider questions around the ways in which bodies, human and more-than-human, are shaped by the structures and systems that surround them.