Description

As a member of the Swansea Print Workshop who doesn’t live in the town where Dylan Thomas grew up, this project has opened up aspects of the poet’s work that I might have otherwise missed.

Through visiting Thomas’ house and places important to him and his writing, attending seminars and getting advice has really enriched the experience of responding to his work. Over a period of months I was able to get to know the city and visit the house where Thomas was born andspent his early years. Recreated for the period of Thomas’ childhood, the furnishings and decor of the house were atmospheric, and the expert advice available provided stories and facts about the Thomas family that gave me new insights.

Cwmdonkin Park’s proximity to the house was intriguing as this was the setting of The hunchback in the park. The poem has distinct echoes of Thomas’ childhood and
memories of the park. The overall theme of belonging seemed to me to come together in Cwmdonkin Park. Here was an obvious sense of belonging, a place of
familiarity and community. A playground.

The poem’s backdrop is the park and the hunchbackwhose daily visits indicate a sense of belonging and yet, conversely, not belonging, being isolated in his difference. A target for the truant schoolboys: ‘And Mister they called Hey mister‘ (Dylan Thomas)

Here, in his isolated world he belongs and doesn’t belong. This is the pathos behind the image I have presented.

Graeme Galvin spent his early years in Zimbabwe. Arriving in the UK, he spent four years at Maidstone College of Art, training in graphic design with an emphasis on illustration. With a varied career in illustration, exhibition, film, television and theatre design he has accumulated a range of techniques which is now finding expression through the medium of printmaking.