Description

Our visit to 5 Cwmdonkin Drive provided an animated and informative background to the situation that Dylan Thomas grew up in and provided many insights into the social context of his adolescent experience.

It was particularly striking that there seemed to be  much in his situation that would engender a sense of ‘otherness’ rather than ‘belonging’. This also added to my understanding of the poem, The hunchback in the park as a metaphor for his preoccupation with an inner world of language and poetry and which also served to alienate him from his surroundings.

Inner city bombsites were an integral part of my childhood experience growing up in Hull where members of my family lost everything when their house was razed to the ground in one of the many bombing raids on the city. I was drawn to Return Journey because of this and because it provides a pivotal point/point of contact between remembered experiences and the shocking absence of the physical landmarks to those experiences.

Photographs found in the archives at Swansea Library revealed a catastrophic background of devastation to central Swansea after the two nights of bombing in 1941.

Although it is a sombre and moving piece on this level, there is still the sense that life goes on; there is still the engagement with the actors on the stage even though the scenery has changed dramatically. There is still the eye for comic detail and it was this that finally drives the narrative in the print.

The syntax/style of the print also unexpectedly revived memories of prints on my school walls by war artists such as Ravilious, Bawden and Piper.

Jackie Ford taught on degree programmes at Swansea Institute of Higher Education in printmaking, photography and time-based media. She co-founded Swansea Print Workshop in 1998 and has been responsible for the development of programmes since then.