Sweet Melancholy, Elin Gruffydd, Partian

Mel Perry

To hold this book in my hands is to feel two islands – Enlli and Hydra, two artists – Brenda Chamberlain and Elin Gruffydd, twine with my fingers through the lenses of thought and camera.

Sweet Melancholy, published by Parthian, is an art book by film photographer Elin Gruffydd who became familiar with the art and writing of Welsh artist Brenda Chamberlain when she spent two seasons living and working on Ynys Enlli.

Her work regularly took Elin to Carreg Fawr, the house in which Chamberlain lived for fourteen years and during which time she used the walls as canvas for painting. Immersing herself in the Brenda’s work, specifically Tide Race (1962) and subsequently A Rope of Vines: Journal from a Greek Island (1965) Elin finds connections with her own interests and studies. Brenda’s words rise up to the photographer, whose own experiences of Enlli and Hydra, and interests in women and art in Greek mythology, inform sweet melancholy.

Elin takes fragments of lines from the two Chamberlain books – themselves combinations of prose, poetry and drawings – and curates them with some of her own analogue photographs, many using a double exposure technique, of both islands. The artist ties a tight knot across the languages of Enlli and Hydra, and her own culture and interests by offering readers her book’s introduction in Cymraeg, English and Ελληνικά.

Synclines and anticlines

I am fascinated by Elin’s process that has given us this book. How many times have I walked on Enlli or elsewhere, sat on a clifftop or beach and softened my eyes and ears to sights and sounds around me? How many times in those moments have the words of Gillian Clarke, Christine Evans or Michael Longley risen up through my gauzy vision or hearing to shape my own writing of place? How often does reading a poetic text take me to my significant places and how do I see those precious moments in my mind’s eye. How did Brenda’s words and Elin’s eyes fold over each other, like Precambrian synclines and anticlines, to make this curious and inviting volume?

This is a visually exciting book of Enlli, creating a strong sense of uncertainty and mystery, worthy of deeper enquiry. It’s a novel and complementary work to Bardsey by Christine Evans and Wolf Marloh (Gomer Press, 2008). Marloh’s images are mostly clear, concrete, as they document the lives, times and work of Enlli and its people. Elin’s photographs however, of Enlli particularly, are more abstract and conceptual and invite in me a more translucent, relaxation into imagination.

The image accompanied by Brenda’s line This was to be an afternoon of daylight dream is of a scene I know well. Elin’s lens takes our eyes through the frame of a boat, across the Swnt, Enlli Sound, towards St Mary’s Well and Uwchmynydd. I sense that I stand beside the photographer in the boat, my mind’s eye swivels aft to the island’s landmarks of Bae Nant or Lord Newborough’s cross and to my own writing.

I hear sound in Elin’s photographs too. A dreamy image of oyster catchers rising alongside a fishing boat with words on the facing page

How wounding reality can be, how raw, ever-changing in its patterns…at other
times boring in its repetitions.

and I can hear the insistent cries that punctuate the island’s quiet until the chicks are fledged, the slap-slop of wave on hull as the fisherman pauses to raise his lobster pots.

Power and beauty 

The sea, unsurprisingly, features in many of the photographs. It might be the Argolic Gulf of the Aegean or Cardigan Bay in the Irish Sea, but they all have heart-stopping power and beauty, in particular where salt spray becomes gold leaf in the sun’s morning glare. Some of the images are clear that they are either Hydra – a cat or an olive tree, or Enlli – foxgloves on the headland, but there are some that are more illusory, bound as they are by the physical similarities between the two islands.

I am grateful to have known the distinguished Welsh female artist, Ray Howard-Jones. Her time spent during summers in the 1950s on Skomer, off the Pembrokeshire coast, coincides with Brenda’s on Enlli. Elin’s photographs remind me of Ray’s paintings, especially those from the Skomer, Marloes period of the 60s and 70s. Seeing Elin’s work I am taken back to gouache, pastels and chalk – often on newspaper or brown parcel paper – of the coast around the Dale Peninsula and particularly a view from the caravan or Rath Cottage in which she lived near the Deer Park. Elin’s photographic technique and final images in this book not only connect Enlli and Hydra, but they also evoke Ray’s admirable work from a similar landscape.

Jill Piercy’s full-length biography Brenda Chamberlain: Artist and Writer (Parthian, 2019) is the rich cake upon which to feast for the details of Brenda’s life and work. Sweet Melancholy is the spoon of cream that lingers and swirls new patterns in my imagination.

This book is one to sit with. Let it draw your eyes to and fro from text to image, soften your mind’s ears and eyes. Think of two women – Welsh artists, drawn to the margins of land on myth. The images in this book help me hold on to some of the wonder that I find in total lack of distraction, on Enlli. May you find some of that wonder too in the pages of Sweet Melancholy.

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