Catrin Menai (b. 1987) is an artist working between Wales and Glasgow. Attending to the materials of attention, she uses words, film and found objects as a way to explore chains of association, methods of exchange, and various forms of company.

“I read somewhere that inside the spinal cord of a horse is a butterfly-shaped core of nerve cells. It’s an image that stays with me, just like ‘home’ does and all the images attached that bundle and emerge, that take flight. I was pulled towards the horse figurine found by ‘chance’ whilst digging in a garden in Pant-yr-Heol, Pentwyn Mawr (1949). I imagined a person moving towards a horse and a horse moving towards a person, the underlying communication here; of encounter and entanglement. It’s true, we are entangled with our habitat. The friction is scientific but full of poetry, as the landscape moves, opens out.”

References:

1. Bronze horse figurine, 100 BCE–100 CE
2. Carneddau Mountains
3. Brenda Chamberlain – Life-sized horses drawn directly onto the walls with charcoal and red ochre (Carreg Fawr, Ynys Enlli). Chamberlain waving goodbye to a boat from the island
4. Patrick Farmer – Close mic hydrophone field recording of ice melting on Fachwen Pool (Newtown).