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Boia Festival Arts Trail at the Seion Chapel and vestry, New Street, St Davids.

Free entry.

This year the festival is presenting two art installations (free to the public) as well as a host of music acts from Pembrokeshire, across Wales, Ireland and further afield.


Modrwy Diemwnt – sonic and visual art installation by Carmarthemshire-based sound artist/composer Richard James (formerly of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci) and St Davids-based painter Tony Kitchell.

There is really here – a short art/sci-fi film installation by internationally exhibited St Davids-based artist and film maker Ben Lloyd.


Modrwy Diemwnt – sonic and visual art installation (main chapel) Fri 25-Thu 31 October, 10am-6pm.

(Note that this exhibition runs to the Thursday after the music festival to include half term week)

Sound artist, Richard James, and painter,Tony Kitchell, are collaborating to create a sound and visual art installation with the shared themes of community, environment and climate change.
Richard has created a series of immersive 5.1 surround sound and music pieces which flow in to one another to complement Tony Kitchell’s artwork Modrwy Diemwnt within their shared and collaborative overarching themes of nature, environment and climate. The installation will be presented at Capel Seion, St Davids, as a part of the Boia festival, which opens on Friday October 25th 2024.

Included in Richard’s compositions are natural sounds recorded in the environment in Pembrokeshire, including the musical characteristics of local Preseli blue stones at Carn Menyn (famous for being part of Stone Henge in Wiltshire). A section of the recording also includes the voice of fifteen year old Lili Williams, relaying her thoughts on climate change and the climate emergency, looking ahead to the future, and recorded conversations with her friends and contemporaries. The artist Accü also contributes harp and vocal to some of the pieces. The compositions are inspired by the landscapes of west Wales, the urgency for action on the climate emergency, and ancient pagan relationships to nature, highlighting the need for a reawakening and new appreciation of a symbiotic and respectful relationship with the natural world, in the transition to cleaner energy production which is less destructive to the natural environment than the extraction and burning of fossil fuels.
A stereo mix of the music produced for the surround sound installation will be available to download from the Evolution Of Beauty bandcamp page from the opening day of the festival, with a suggested donation to a climate and/or social justice charity. 

Tony’s work, co-created with local school children, will include a large visual art piece suspended in the chapel, inspired by the visual experience of a total eclipse of the Sun, often referred to as a diamond ring, modrwy diement in Welsh, due to the black disc of the Moon being ringed by the Sun’s thin fiery corona against the darkness of space. Tony will be using charcoal made from bushes which caught fire on the cliffs near St. Davids in the heat wave of 2022 (caused by climate change). He has also utilised recycled materials in its construction.

There is really here – a film by Ben Lloyd (Seion Chapel vestry building) Fri 25-Sun 27 October, 10am-6pm.

Seion Chapel Vestry, New Street, St Davids. Fri 25-Sun 27 October, 10am-6pm.

The first woman of the future, smashes through the glass wall of the totalitarian state and into primeval nature. 
A short art/sci-fi film installation at Seion Chapel vestry building, Fri 25-Sun 27 October, 10am-6pm. The film, directed by Ben Lloyd and produced by Fiksa, will be on show here in both Cymraeg and English on a loop throughout the three days of the festival. The script was adapted from utopian literature and primarily uses text from the book by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924), the dystopian novel that inspired George Orwell’s ‘1984’, amongst others.
The film is part of a larger project, The Utopian Impulse, which sets out to reappraise our psychic link to the natural world, re-evaluate the different consciousnesses we can experience through creative acts, and remove the artist from the linear perspective of time.
The perennial positioning of utopia in the forever delayed future or on some distant unreachable shore is a false narrative that helps to manufacture consent. An aim of the project is to help us wake up from this false consciousness and see, that we’ve always been here in time and space. Indivisibly here. There is really here, utopia is here and now.

About the Artists

Richard James

Evolution Of Beauty is the relatively new project from west Wales based composer, musician and sound artist Richard James (Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci), releasing an EP ‘Light:Dark Travel Fields’ in 2021, and an album ‘Mosaic’ in 2023. Richard is currently working on new music and sound projects including a new album.

https://evolutionofbeauty.bandcamp.com/
https://linktr.ee/HotelETAl

Tony Kitchell

Tony is a painter who has been based in St.Davids for more than 40 years. His work explores his passion for the landscapes and coastline of both Pembrokeshire and the Atlantic island of Madiera. He has his own gallery in St Davids and is an accomplished surfer. Inevitably, concerns about the environment begin to infiltrate his work, like the one for this festival.
https://www.studio6stdavids.com/gallery_747490.html

Ben Lloyd

Ben is a contemporary artist, lecturer, and researcher, living and working near St Davids. He has exhibited widely across the UK including Chapter, Cardiff, and The British Museum, London. Utopia has been at the heart of his art practice for over ten years. Over this time, he has developed several large projects such as Gwales, The Road to New York, and Empire Kiosk, which have all been predicated on extensive research into various utopian communities and their migrations, whether mythological or historical. Behind each of these, and every other utopian community, lies the utopian impulse.
https://benglloyd.co.uk/