Robin Mason

This small painting is exploring the experience of reverie as it has emerged during the Whispers from Bryn Myrddin Residency, working in sustained dialogue with an archive of words, images, and fragments accumulated across generations.

 

Reverie here is not escape, but a cognitive and emotional state, a drifting attention in which memory, affect, and imagination begin to intermingle. The forest becomes a metaphor for this condition: dense, layered, and difficult to navigate. Hundreds of images and thousands of words press in at once, producing sudden shifts in tone — from joy to sadness, clarity to confusion. Letters float through the trees, moving between path and place, from and toward Bryn Myrddin, suggesting language in transit rather than fixed meaning. The archive does not unfold sequentially; it arrives in waves.

 

Flowing from one tree, a stream of coloured glass balls marks a particular memory held within this wider field. Around forty years ago, Debra and I had a studio on Bermondsey Street, then a working place of manufacturing and warehouses, heavy with the grey residue of its industrial past. One afternoon, a flatbed lorry swerved into a factory entrance opposite us. As it turned, a sack caught on ironwork and split open, releasing hundreds and thousands — a tide of colour spilling across road and pavement.

 

The sweets were destined for a chocolate factory, to be scattered over setting white chocolate and become sprinkled buttons. But on that day, they were released prematurely, washing through the street like a rainbow in shadow. The moment triggered an intense, childlike wonder, a reverie that has endured.

 

In this painting, that memory returns as material metaphor. At times, working with the archive feels like encountering a similar rupture: a tear in the sack where colour, emotion, and association spill out unexpectedly, allowing the present mind to mingle with those who came before.

 

Reverie becomes a method, not of control, but of attention