Serpentine (a weaving) [following Antonio Paucar]

Spirals recur in the work of Antonio Paucar, showing in Llandudno and Cardiff as part of Artes Mundi 11: one of his many motifs recasting inherited aesthetic hierarchies from an Indigenous Andean perspective. Responding to this work, Fern Thomas has pursued her own spirals, in language, drawing and movement, in tandem with practice-based research in Wales’ national prehistoric archaeology collections. We begin from her own somatic wanderings, before she takes us to the stone circles and Iron Age hillforts of Wales’ rural south-west, where she lives: as a way of attempting to grasp hold of the spiral, to try to contain it. Continuing beside/gerllaw’s emphasis on embodied and site-responsive methods, ‘Serpentine (a weaving)’ rehearses a spiraline methodology, understanding the ancient and the contemporary – as well as ‘local’ and cosmic landscapes, and immediate experience and historical narrative – as being in constant, complicated coexistence.

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