Commissioned and presented by National Eisteddfod, Meifod, Wales. The artists made two new pieces of work in response to the festivals desire to make tribute to Iowerth Peate and to celebrate Montgomeryshire’s rural location, land and agriculture.
The scope of the landscape is captured through an aerial photograph of the Nant yr Eira valley, an elevated and distant observation of fields and moorland surrounding isolated dwellings, including the chapel built by Peate’s grandfather. Walking through the same fields as viewed from above Ackroyd & Harvey photographed a Charalay bull, a challenging and detailed portrait of life within the field.
“connoting place, time, local and national history and, through the medium of grass, regeneration simultaneously. As with their earliest installations, duration – in this case, the fleeting image captured from above; the notion of time embedded in the growing of the photograph – unites with location in order to probe the very place in which the work will first reside. The thousands of blades of grass, which when seen from up close deny the viewer apprehension of the image, (will) insist upon perception and thus contemplation from a distance.”
Extract from the festival catalogue by Alison Bracker