Swansea University Art Collection

John Uzzell Edwards, born in 1934, in a mining village in the Rhymney valley, was an artist for whom Wales and its history infused a lifetime’s passionate picture making. He was inspired by Celtic arts and craft, including welsh quilts, Celtic crosses and stone inscriptions, mediaeval tiles and ancient manuscripts. 

Named Dre Fach Felindre after a village in Carmarthenshire, this painting is inspired by a welsh quilt, possibly named after where the original quilt came from but also invoking a sense of place. Often handmade from scraps of fabric, quilts carry memories of their creators in squares of re-purposed fabric and clothes. Here we see Edwards take this process of assembling a finished whole from disparate sources as a starting point for his work with the multi-layered and re-worked surfaces offering clues to his thought processes. 

Layers of paint and pieces of found material store all the creative decisions that went into its creation. The painting becomes an object rather than a depiction of place and offers two experiences, the close up and the distant view. Whilst stepping back you see the overall effect and design and only when you move in close do you get to appreciate the tiny, debris strewn landscapes and the work that went into them. 

By rooting his work in the quilt, an everyday domestic object from our shared past,  John Uzzell Edwards has created a work that acts as a talisman for belonging, a memory object for a collective home.