Artist Insights: Mair Hughes | TULCA 2025
Artist Insights is an ongoing interview featuring artists participating in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. Through short filmed conversations, the series offers insight into artistic processes, thematic concerns, and the ideas shaping each edition of the festival.
Mair Hughes
Hughes creates sculptural installations that centre material practices and ecological narratives, employing a wide variety of media from site-specific work to ceramics, textiles, drawing and photography. Her work makes adventurous, playful connections between obscured histories and the contemporary world, connecting with activities of forage, reuse and improvisation. Hughes’ current work explores landscape, archaeology and simple acts of dwelling, taking a long perspective on belonging and place.
The Borderlands/Y Gororau is a project led by Mair Hughes. The project explores the potency, plurality and value of Welsh borderland landscapes, and personal experiences of dual identity and Welshness. Emily Joy, Mair Hughes, and Durre Shahwar create work which reflects on sites across the Welsh borderlands, bringing together collaborative research and individual responses through their practice in writing, photography, sculpture and site-specific exploration.
A Field Guide to the Offa’s Dyke delves into the artist’s experience of growing up in the Welsh borders with dual Welsh-English identity. The installation explores the psychogeography of the dyke in the present time, alongside speculative reimaginings of the borderlands and dual identities as a space of creative potential as well as ambiguity. The installation draws on the form of Offa’s dyke, an ancient border earthwork which marks a distinct physical line across the Welsh borderland landscape. The Dyke was constructed in an uneven shape, with the bank much higher on the Welsh side, to allow long views into the landscape. The wool textile piece reimagines a slogan painted on a farmhouse inhabited by members of the artist’s family. The new version, in Welsh, reads ‘Nid ni oddi wrth frenhinoedd, na brenhinoedd oddi wrthym ni’, which means ‘Not We From Kings, Nor From Us Kings’.
The audio reflects on visits to sites on the dyke, combined with reflections on family and the borderlands.
Video documentation: Laura Griffin