Emrys — The Great Welsh Dragon

How do you tell the story of a country you are afraid of losing?

I decided to build a dragon.

Not simply a sculpture of the Welsh Dragon, but a dragon that would somehow contain Wales itself.

Its history.

Its mythology.

Its industry.

Its landscape.

Its people.

And, although I didn't fully understand it when I began, a part of me.

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A Long Way From Home

In April 2005, I moved to New Zealand with my husband and son.

For many years, I made it work. But distance has a strange way of making you look back at where you came from, and somewhere along the way I began to feel a growing pull towards Wales.

I would spend sixteen years in New Zealand, but during the later years of my life there I became increasingly fascinated by my Welsh identity.

Where had I come from?

Who were the people who had lived there before me?

What had they endured, built and believed?

What stories had they told?

And how much of them remained in me?

I began researching.

And then came Emrys.

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A Dragon Built From Wales

What began as a fascination with Welsh history became an extraordinary two-and-a-half-year obsession.

I didn't want simply to make a dragon and decorate it with Welsh things.

I wanted Wales to build the dragon.

Copper, steel and slate became more than materials. Industry, landscape, mythology and history became part of his physical form.

His legs became mine shafts.

Railways crossed the landscape beneath him.

Welsh industry became embedded within his structure.

Painted panels carried recorded history on one side and mythology and legend on the other.

Across his body sat approximately 960 individually made copper scales, with 742 engraved with the names of Welsh personalities.

Kings and poets.

Actors and musicians.

Scientists, sportspeople, writers and rebels.

The celebrated alongside those whose names are less often remembered.

The deeper I travelled into the story of Wales, the larger Emrys seemed to become.

There was always another person, another story, another piece of history I wanted him to carry.

He stopped being simply a sculpture of the Welsh Dragon.

He became my monument to Wales.

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Something Else Was Happening

But while I was building Emrys, something was happening that I hadn't expected.

With every piece I created, I felt increasingly connected to the country I was researching.

To its people.

Its landscape.

Its history.

And to generations of people I would never meet, but who had walked the same land from which I came.

I had begun by trying to understand Wales.

Somewhere during those two and a half years, I realised I was also trying to understand myself.

There is a Welsh word that would eventually become inseparable from Emrys for me.

Hiraeth.

But that belongs to another part of his story.

Because Emrys didn't remain a Welsh dragon living on the other side of the world.

Remarkably, he found his way home.

And eventually, so did I.

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Explore Emrys

See how I built Emrys → Creation Gallery

Follow the extraordinary two-and-a-half-year process of constructing the dragon — from early sketches and steel framework to copper, slate, painted panels and hundreds of individually made pieces.

Journal 1 → Inside the Great Welsh Dragon

Take Emrys apart piece by piece and discover the history, mythology, people and symbolism hidden within him.

Journal 2 → The Dragon That Found His Way Home

Discover the more personal story behind Emrys — belonging, ancestry, hiraeth, the strangers who helped a Welsh dragon cross the world, and the journey that eventually brought us both home.