Robin Mason

The path to Bryn Myrddin does not move in a straight line. It bends through the forest, through memory, through the layered remains of lives that once moved beneath these branches.

 

In this painting, the forest becomes a living archive. The pink path, which has appeared throughout this body of work, passes quietly through the trees like a seam between worlds. It is both a remembered path and a painted one, carrying the atmosphere of my first London bedsit, where Wales first began to return through paint.

 

Scattered among the trees are fragments from the Lewis family archive. Small photographs appear like quiet declarations within the branches, moments where the past interrupts the landscape and insists on being seen. They do not behave like framed documents in a museum. Instead, they hover and gather among trunks and shadows, as if the forest itself has begun to remember.

 

The trees hold these images lightly. They become temporary exhibition walls, memory structures where letters, stories and photographs settle for a moment before drifting again into narrative. The archive is not stable here; it grows, branches, and reshapes itself.

 

At the centre sits the cut trunk, its exposed rings marking time, interruption and survival. Around it, the forest continues its slow movement, leaning forward and backwards at the same time, entangling the past with the future.

 

This painting imagines the forest not simply as landscape but as a field of inheritance. The photographs of the Lewis family stand quietly among the trees, declaring their presence.

 

Stories do not disappear.

 

They change form.
 Sometimes they return as paths.
 Sometimes they return as paintings.