Inside the Great Welsh Dragon | Emrys by Julia O'Sullivan
Emrys
Inside The Great Welsh Dragon
The History, Mythology and Symbolism Hidden Within Emrys
The Great Welsh Dragon — Journal 1
Inside the Dragon: The Stories That Built Emrys
Chapter 4: Forged from Wales
Chapter 5: The Skin of a Nation
Chapter 6: Wales Beneath His Feet
Chapter 7: Giving Emrys Wings
Chapter 8: The Tail: Wales Beyond Wales
Chapter 9: The Things You Might Never Notice
The Great Welsh Dragon Journal 2: The Dragon Found His Way Home
Chapter One
This Is Not Just a Dragon
From a distance, Emrys is unmistakable.
A great Welsh dragon.
Come closer, though, and he begins to become something else.
The dragon is really a container.
I used his body as a place to gather together the Wales I discovered through years of research — its history, mythology, people, industries, landscape, achievements, suffering, humour and stories.
Nothing was added simply because it looked Welsh.
It had to mean something.
That became my rule.
If I was going to place something on this dragon, I needed to know why it deserved to be there.
And that created a rather enormous problem.
How do you decide what represents Wales?
A flag?
A castle?
A coal mine?
A poet?
A rugby player?
A prince?
A mythical king?
A piece of slate?
They are all Wales.
But none of them, individually, is Wales.
So I stopped trying to find one symbol.
Instead, I began building layers.
A Country in Layers
The first layer is immediately recognisable.
The dragon itself.
Y Ddraig Goch has become one of the great symbols of Welsh identity, but I didn't want the familiar red dragon simply reproduced as a three-dimensional object.
I wanted to use its shape as the framework upon which a much larger story could be built.
Then came the materials.
Copper.
Steel.
Slate.
Wood.
Glass.
Stone.
Materials weren't simply chosen because I could work with them. Many connect directly to Welsh landscape, craftsmanship and industry.
Then came the people.
Hundreds of them.
Their names would eventually cover Emrys's body, turning his skin into a record of individual Welsh lives.
Then came the landscape beneath him.
Railways.
Castles.
Industry.
Territories.
Places that had witnessed the story unfolding.
And finally came the paintings.
Because there was something that metal, stone and names alone couldn't contain.
The stories.
Two Different Ways of Telling the Truth
This is where Emrys divides into two extraordinary worlds.
On one side, I painted the history of Wales.
On the other, I painted its mythology and legends.
That division was deliberate.
I didn't want mythology relegated to a decorative corner simply because we cannot prove that its events happened.
Stories tell us something different from historical records.
They tell us what frightened people.
What entertained them.
What they admired.
What they condemned.
What they imagined might be waiting in the darkness.
And, perhaps most importantly, which stories they considered important enough to keep telling.
So I gave both versions of Wales their place.
One side records what happened.
The other remembers what we imagined.
And between them stands the dragon.
But Which Wales?
This was never intended to be a definitive history of Wales.
It couldn't be.
You could give me ten more dragons and I would still run out of room.
Every decision meant leaving something out.
Every person included meant hundreds more could not be.
Every historical event occupied space another might have taken.
The same was true of the legends, castles, industries and places.
So Emrys inevitably became my Wales.
Not because I invented the history, but because I chose which fragments of an enormous national story I wanted this particular dragon to carry.
That distinction matters.
Another Welsh artist could have started with exactly the same dragon and created something completely different.
That is one of the things I now find most interesting about him.
Emrys tells the story of Wales.
But he also reveals what caught my eye while I was looking at it.
And some of those choices are serious.
Some are deeply personal.
Some celebrate extraordinary achievement.
Some remember terrible events.
And some are there because I couldn't resist having a little fun.
There are details on Emrys that someone could stand beside for an hour and still not find.
There are famous Welsh people hiding where you might never expect them.
There are pieces of industrial history disguised as parts of a dragon.
There are jokes.
Connections.
Stories within stories.
And occasionally there are details that make perfect sense only once I explain what was going through my head when I put them there.
That is what this journal is for.
We are going to take Emrys apart.
Not physically — after two and a half years of making him, I have absolutely no intention of doing that.
But piece by piece.
His dragon.
His skin.
His legs.
His wings.
His tail.
The country beneath his feet.
The people covering his body.
The history on one side.
The mythology on the other.
And all the strange little things hiding in between.
Because once you understand what you're looking at, Emrys stops being simply a Welsh dragon.
He becomes hundreds of Welsh stories occupying the same body.
Chapter Two
Why a Dragon?
If I was going to attempt the ridiculous task of putting Wales into a single sculpture, there was really only one creature capable of carrying it.
The dragon.
Y Ddraig Goch.
The Red Dragon is so familiar to us in Wales that perhaps we don't always stop to think about what an extraordinary national symbol it actually is.
We didn't choose a gentle creature.
We chose a monster.
A magnificent, mythical, fire-breathing beast with claws, teeth and wings.
And I rather like that.
Because Wales itself has never been particularly meek.
Its history is filled with invasion, resistance, survival, argument, reinvention and an extraordinary determination to retain an identity of its own.
The dragon felt capable of carrying all of that.
But there was another reason.
The deeper I travelled into Welsh mythology, the more I realised that the dragon doesn't simply represent Wales.
It already has a story.
The Red Dragon and the White
One of the great stories associated with the Welsh dragon tells of two dragons buried beneath the land.
One red.
One white.
Their fighting caused such disturbance that the land above them could not remain stable.
The story appears in different forms across Welsh and British tradition, eventually becoming associated with the young boy who reveals what is hidden beneath the ground.
That boy would later become connected with Myrddin — Merlin.
When the dragons are released, they fight.
The white dragon initially appears dominant, but the red dragon ultimately prevails.
Over time, that red dragon became associated with the Welsh, while the white represented the invading Saxons.
Whether you approach it as mythology, prophecy, political storytelling or simply a cracking tale about two dragons fighting underneath Wales, the imagery is wonderfully powerful.
A nation represented by something that was buried —
but refused to stay buried.
That interested me enormously.
Dinas Emrys
And then there was the place itself.
Dinas Emrys.
The mountain in Snowdonia associated with the legend of the dragons and Myrddin became important not only to the story, but eventually to the identity of my own dragon.
Because I had to name him.
Calling him simply The Great Welsh Dragon wasn't enough.
After everything I was beginning to put into him, he needed to become an individual.
Emrys was the name I chose.
The name carries its own connections with Welsh tradition and with the figure later associated with Merlin, while Dinas Emrys ties it directly to one of the most enduring dragon legends of Wales.
So the name wasn't attached afterwards as a convenient label.
It belonged to the world from which the sculpture had emerged.
He was no longer simply a Welsh dragon.
He was Emrys.
Why Not Just Paint Him Red?
There was, however, an obvious problem.
If the Red Dragon is the national symbol of Wales, why didn't I simply create an enormous red dragon?
Because that would have told you something you already knew.
You could look at him and think:
Wales.
Job done.
But I wanted the second look.
The dragon was only the doorway.
I wanted the familiar outline to draw you in, and then begin to disappear beneath everything it carried.
The closer you came, the less straightforward he would become.
You would stop seeing simply a dragon and begin discovering people, industry, landscape, history, mythology and hundreds of individual stories.
The familiar gave me a way in.
What I did with it allowed me to tell my version of Wales.
A Symbol That Could Hold Contradictions
The dragon also allowed me to do something else that mattered to me.
It could carry contradiction.
Wales has extraordinary beauty, poetry, music, humour and mythology.
It also has bloodshed, conquest, poverty, dangerous industries, lost lives and communities shaped by extraordinary hardship.
I didn't want to create a patriotic ornament that pretended only the beautiful parts existed.
Nor did I want to create something bleak.
I wanted both.
Pride and pain.
History and fantasy.
Achievement and suffering.
Kings and miners.
Castles and coal pits.
Poets and rugby players.
Ancient mythology and popular culture.
The celebrated and the ordinary.
A dragon is rather good at carrying contradictions.
It can be beautiful and terrifying at exactly the same time.
More Than a National Emblem
That is why Emrys had to be a dragon.
Not because I wanted to reproduce the creature on the Welsh flag in three dimensions.
But because the dragon gave me a body capable of carrying everything else.
It gave me a skin.
A spine.
Legs.
Wings.
A tail.
A landscape beneath its feet.
And enormous surfaces upon which stories could unfold.
Every part could become something else while the creature itself remained unmistakably Welsh.
That was the idea that unlocked the whole sculpture for me.
The dragon would be the symbol.
Wales would provide everything that made him.
And now that I had my dragon, I had to decide which Wales he was going to carry.
The Wales recorded in history?
Or the Wales preserved in story?
There was only one answer.
Both.
Chapter Three
Two Wales — History and Mythology
Emrys would carry two versions of Wales.
On one side, the country recorded through history.
On the other, the country preserved through mythology, folklore and legend.
I didn't see these as competing versions of Wales, nor did I consider one more important than the other.
They simply tell us different things.
History attempts to record what happened.
Stories reveal something about the people doing the remembering.
And I wanted to see what happened when I allowed both to occupy the same dragon.
The Wales We Know Happened
The historical side presented an enormous challenge.
Where do you begin?
And perhaps more importantly:
Where on earth do you stop?
Welsh history stretches across thousands of years, and I had a finite amount of dragon.
I couldn't simply illustrate everything.
So I began researching.
One period led to another. One ruler introduced me to another. Battles changed borders, religion changed lives, industry transformed landscapes and ordinary people repeatedly found themselves caught in decisions made by people far more powerful than themselves.
The more I read, the more selective I had to become.
I wasn't trying to create a textbook.
I was creating a visual journey.
I wanted the paintings to carry moments that helped explain how Wales had changed — politically, culturally, socially and physically — and how the country I recognised had emerged from everything that came before it.
Some stories were triumphant.
Others were brutal.
Some made me proud.
Others made me angry.
And some were simply too fascinating to leave out.
That is the problem with history.
Once you start looking closely, the neat version you thought you knew tends to fall apart.
The Wales We Cannot Prove
Then I could turn Emrys around and enter an entirely different world.
Here, historical evidence wasn't the point.
Story was.
Welsh mythology is wonderfully strange.
The tales preserved within the Mabinogion contain magic, betrayal, revenge, love, war, transformation and some spectacularly questionable decision-making.
People become animals.
Women are created from flowers.
Kings wander into supernatural worlds.
The dead can continue speaking after their heads have been removed.
Nothing is particularly safe.
I loved it.
But beneath the fantastical events are recognisably human behaviours.
Jealousy.
Pride.
Loyalty.
Desire.
Cruelty.
Courage.
Grief.
Revenge.
Perhaps that is one reason these stories survive.
Remove the magic and monsters and, underneath, people are still being people.
Are Legends Less True?
While working on Emrys, I became increasingly interested in what we actually mean when we call something true.
Historical records attempt to tell us what happened.
Legends do something else.
They tell us what people remembered, imagined, feared and valued.
A story does not need to be factually true to become part of a country's identity.
Generations of people can carry it.
A landscape can become associated with it.
A name can survive because of it.
A dragon that almost certainly never fought another dragon beneath a Welsh mountain can eventually appear on the flag of an entire nation.
That's quite an achievement for something that supposedly isn't real.
So I never regarded the mythology side of Emrys as less important than the historical side.
If anything, putting them opposite one another created a conversation.
This is what happened.
And this is what we told ourselves.
Somewhere between the two sits identity.
Retelling the Old Stories
There was another challenge.
Many of these stories have travelled an extraordinary distance to reach us.
They have been spoken, remembered, written down, translated, interpreted and retold.
Every generation encounters them through different eyes.
I was doing exactly the same thing.
I wasn't trying to produce definitive illustrations of Welsh mythology.
I was taking stories that had survived for centuries and allowing them to pass through my imagination.
That gave me freedom.
I could respect the original story while still bringing my humour, visual language and contemporary references into it.
And I did.
Welsh personalities began wandering into ancient tales.
Modern references found themselves sitting beside legendary characters.
Sometimes the connection was carefully considered.
Sometimes it was mischievous.
And sometimes I simply couldn't resist.
That is part of storytelling too.
Stories survive because people keep doing something with them.
A Dragon With Two Faces
There was something wonderfully contradictory about using a creature born from legend to carry documented history.
Emrys didn't need to choose between the two.
He belonged to both.
But kings, battles, myths and legends could only tell part of the story.
Because Wales wasn't shaped only by the people who ruled it or the stories told about it.
It was shaped by what came out of its ground.
Coal.
Slate.
Copper.
Iron.
And, more importantly, by the lives of the people who worked them.
If those industries helped build Wales, then they were going to help build my dragon too.
Chapter Four
Forged From Wales
If Emrys was going to tell the story of Wales, I didn't want that story simply painted onto his surface.
I wanted it built into him.
That meant the materials mattered.
Copper.
Steel.
Slate.
Iron.
They weren't simply practical choices or decorative finishes. They connected Emrys physically to the industries that transformed Wales and to the generations of people whose lives were shaped by them.
The Industrial Revolution changed the Welsh landscape almost beyond recognition. Mining and metalworking brought extraordinary innovation, employment and prosperity, but they also brought danger, exploitation, pollution and communities whose lives were tied to what could be extracted from the ground.
At one point Swansea became so important to the copper industry that it earned the name Copperopolis. Welsh iron travelled around the world, our coal powered industry and shipping, and slate quarried from Welsh mountains roofed buildings far beyond Wales.
These weren't simply industries.
They changed towns.
They changed landscapes.
They changed families.
They changed Wales.
So if I was going to build a dragon about Wales, I wanted the country that had been dug, quarried, smelted and forged to become part of his physical identity.
Standing on Coal
Look at Emrys's legs and you aren't simply looking at four supports holding up a very large dragon.
They reference coal mine shafts.
I wanted one of the most important — and most brutal — chapters of Welsh industrial history to become part of the structure that physically holds him upright.
Coal transformed Wales.
Entire communities grew around the pits. Generations of families depended upon them. Men descended underground into conditions most of us today can barely imagine, while the landscape above became marked by collieries, railways and spoil heaps.
There is pride in that history.
But there is pain too.
People died extracting what lay beneath Welsh soil.
Families lost husbands, fathers and sons.
Communities could prosper because of a mine and then be devastated when it disappeared.
I didn't want to romanticise that.
Nor did I want to ignore what those communities achieved.
So the mines became structural.
Emrys quite literally stands upon them.
Copperopolis
Then there is copper.
Lots of copper.
It covers Emrys in hundreds of scales, appears within his wings and travels throughout the sculpture.
That choice wasn't accidental.
Copper occupies an extraordinary place in Welsh industrial history, particularly around Swansea.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Swansea became one of the great centres of global copper smelting. Its furnaces processed ore arriving from around the world, and the industry transformed both the economy and the environment of the area.
There is an interesting contradiction there.
Copper can be beautiful.
Warm.
Reflective.
Almost jewel-like when worked.
Yet the industry behind it could be filthy, dangerous and destructive.
That contradiction appealed to me.
I could take a material connected to heavy industry and turn it into something almost delicate.
A dragon's scale.
A wing.
A decorative surface.
The material carried its history with it even after I changed its form.
And that is something I repeatedly wanted Emrys to do:
make the past physically present.
Steel, Iron and the Wales That Travelled
Iron and steel presented another part of the story.
Welsh ironworks once became enormously important internationally. Rails manufactured in Wales helped carry the railway age far beyond the country itself.
That fascinated me.
Something produced within relatively small Welsh communities could travel across the world and become part of enormous networks connecting people and places.
So railways appear within Emrys too.
They aren't simply little tracks added because trains look suitably industrial.
They represent movement.
Industry.
Engineering.
Export.
The connection between what Wales produced and the wider world that consumed it.
There is also something rather wonderful about using steel to tell that story.
A material associated with strength and engineering becomes part of the skeleton and landscape of a mythical creature.
Once again, history and imagination collide.
Slate — Wales Beneath His Feet
Slate carries a different quality from the metals.
It feels unmistakably Welsh.
The quarries of North Wales transformed mountains and communities, while Welsh slate travelled far beyond the country itself.
That made using the real material important to me.
I was constructing Emrys in New Zealand, thousands of miles from Wales, yet here was a material that had made its own journey across the world.
I didn't need to manufacture a symbolic connection.
The material already carried one.
Later, slate would become fundamental to the landscape beneath Emrys, but we'll explore that properly when we reach his base.
For now, what mattered was the principle.
Whenever I could, I wanted the substance of Wales — not merely an image representing Wales — to become part of the sculpture.
Industry Wasn't Just Machines
There was another danger I was very conscious of.
When we talk about industrial heritage, it is easy to become fascinated by machinery.
Mine shafts.
Furnaces.
Railways.
Chimneys.
Engineering.
They make wonderful visual material.
But machines aren't heritage on their own.
People are.
Behind every mine shaft were miners.
Behind every furnace were workers.
Behind the railways were the people who built and operated them.
Behind every piece of slate was somebody who had quarried, split and carried it.
Industry changed Wales because it changed human lives.
That mattered enormously to me.
I didn't want Emrys to become a celebration of industrial power while forgetting the people whose bodies supplied it.
The machinery may dominate the landscape.
The people are the reason the story matters.
Even the Chimneys Have Company
Of course, this being one of my artworks, I couldn't leave the industrial landscape entirely solemn.
Hidden amongst the chimneys is a very small visitor.
Idris.
The little dragon from Ivor the Engine.
Because if you are going to spend two and a half years constructing an enormous Welsh dragon filled with industrial history, surely there is room somewhere for a tiny dragon who lives in a Welsh railway engine.
I certainly thought so.
And that tiny detail says something about how I approached Emrys as a whole.
Welsh identity isn't only battles, industry and great historical figures.
It is also childhood.
Television.
Humour.
Music.
Shared references.
The little things that make somebody look closely and smile because they recognise something that belongs to them too.
Emrys could carry all of it.
Built From the Story He Tells
By now, the idea was becoming physical.
Copper had become skin.
Steel had become bone.
Mine shafts had become legs.
Slate was becoming land.
The industries that had helped build Wales were quite literally helping me build Emrys.
But there was something far more important than any material I could use.
People.
Kings and miners.
Poets and actors.
Scientists, musicians, sportspeople, writers, rebels and hundreds of others whose individual lives had become part of the story of Wales.
If Emrys was going to carry that story, then somehow he had to carry them too.
And for that, I had nearly a thousand pieces of copper waiting for me.
Chapter Five
The Skin of a Nation
A country is not its flag.
It isn't its borders, its mountains or its castles.
It isn't even its history.
A country is its people.
Once I had decided that Emrys would carry Wales within him, I knew the people had to be there too.
Not represented by a handful of portraits somewhere on a painted panel.
I wanted them to become part of the dragon himself.
So I gave them his skin.
Hundreds of Pieces. Hundreds of Lives.
Emrys is covered in approximately 960 individually made copper scales.
When I began, I thought I would need about 600.
Clearly, I underestimated my dragon.
Of those scales, 742 carry the names of personalities connected with Wales — people from across the arts, sport, literature, music, entertainment, politics, history and other walks of Welsh life.
Some names are instantly recognisable.
Others may make you stop and wonder:
Who was that?
I rather like that.
Because Emrys was never intended to become simply a collection of Welsh celebrities.
I wanted his scales to encourage discovery.
A familiar name might create recognition.
An unfamiliar one might send somebody searching.
And suddenly a tiny piece of copper has introduced another person to another Welsh story.
Why Names?
I could have covered Emrys in ordinary dragon scales.
It certainly would have been easier.
But somewhere during my research I became overwhelmed by the number of extraordinary people who had emerged from such a relatively small country.
Actors.
Writers.
Poets.
Musicians.
Scientists.
Inventors.
Sportspeople.
Political figures.
Performers.
People who became internationally famous and others whose influence may be far less immediately recognised.
One person led me to another.
And another.
And another.
The list became enormous.
That fascinated me because national identity is often presented through a handful of famous figures.
But culture doesn't work like that.
It accumulates.
One voice joins another.
One achievement builds upon something that came before.
One generation influences the next.
So instead of choosing a few people to stand apart from the dragon, I allowed hundreds of names to sit alongside one another.
No individual scale makes Emrys.
Together, they make his skin.
Who Gets to Be Welsh?
Choosing the names also raised an interesting question.
What actually makes somebody Welsh enough to belong on a Welsh dragon?
Birth?
Ancestry?
Where they lived?
What they contributed?
How they identified themselves?
The answer wasn't always straightforward.
Most of the names I chose are Welsh, but there are a small number who were not born in Wales and are included for personal or cultural reasons. The book itself acknowledges those exceptions rather than pretending every name fits neatly into a single definition of Welshness.
And I think that's important.
Identity is rarely as tidy as we would like it to be.
People can be born into a culture, inherit it, discover it, contribute to it or carry it far beyond the borders of the country itself.
So the scales became more than a list.
They made me think about something much larger:
Who gets included when we tell the story of a nation?
The Famous Beside the Less Familiar
There are names on Emrys that almost anybody will recognise.
Richard Burton.
Anthony Hopkins.
Catherine Zeta-Jones.
And many, many more.
But fame wasn't the only thing that interested me.
I wanted breadth.
Different generations.
Different achievements.
Different ways of contributing to Welsh culture and identity.
That means somebody looking at Emrys may recognise ten names immediately and know absolutely nothing about the eleventh.
Perfect.
Go and find out.
That is exactly the kind of curiosity I wanted the sculpture to create.
Because once you start researching people, history becomes human.
Dates become lives.
Industries become families.
Achievements become struggles.
And a country stops being an abstract idea.
From a Distance and Up Close
There is something else I love about the scales.
From across the room, you don't read the names.
You see a dragon.
The individual disappears into the whole.
Move closer and everything changes.
Suddenly the surface breaks apart into hundreds of separate pieces.
Separate names.
Separate lives.
Separate contributions.
That became a rather beautiful metaphor without me necessarily setting out to create one.
We talk about Wales as though it is one thing.
But Wales exists because millions of individual lives have occupied it, shaped it, left it, returned to it, fought over it, written about it, sung about it and carried pieces of it into the wider world.
The nation exists because the individuals do.
And so does Emrys.
From a distance, you see Wales.
Up close, you see the people who made it.
Not a Ranking
The scales are not a league table.
Being on one part of Emrys rather than another doesn't make somebody more important.
Nor was I attempting to create a definitive list of the greatest Welsh people who ever lived.
That would be impossible — and probably cause an argument lasting considerably longer than the two and a half years it took me to build the dragon.
This is a collection created through my research.
It reflects the people I encountered, the stories that caught my attention and the enormous problem of having a finite amount of copper and an apparently infinite number of Welsh people I could have included.
There will always be somebody missing.
Probably hundreds of somebodies.
That doesn't diminish those who are there.
It simply demonstrates something I discovered repeatedly while creating Emrys:
Wales was always bigger than the space I had available to tell its story.
The People Became the Dragon
There is another reason I find the scales particularly meaningful now.
Copper connected me to Welsh industry.
The names connected me to Welsh lives.
Together, they transformed the surface of Emrys into something neither could have achieved alone.
Each little piece of copper carried a name, and together those names wrapped themselves around the body of a creature that has represented Wales for centuries.
The symbolism became beautifully simple.
A dragon may represent a nation.
But people create one.
That is why the Welsh people don't merely appear on Emrys.
They are part of his physical identity.
They protect him.
They cover him.
They catch the light across his body.
They became his skin.
And while hundreds of Welsh lives travelled across Emrys, beneath every one of them was something equally important.
The land itself.
So next we have to look down.
Because the base beneath this dragon isn't simply something designed to stop half a tonne of Emrys falling over.
It is Wales.
Chapter Six
Wales Beneath His Feet
When you create a sculpture weighing almost half a tonne, a substantial base is not exactly optional.
But I wasn't going to give Emrys an ordinary plinth.
By this stage, that would have felt almost insulting.
If his body carried the people of Wales and his structure carried its industrial history, then the ground beneath him had to become something too.
So I gave Emrys a country to stand upon.
Wales.
A Country Made From Slate
The landscape beneath Emrys is formed from genuine Welsh slate.
By the time I reached the base, there was really no other material I wanted to use.
Slate has shaped both the physical and human landscape of Wales for centuries. Mountains were cut into, communities grew around quarries and Welsh slate travelled far beyond the country that produced it.
I had already decided that wherever possible the materials within Emrys should carry a genuine connection to the stories they represented.
So rather than creating the appearance of a Welsh landscape, I could actually build one from a piece of Wales.
The slate was broken, shaped and assembled into the country beneath Emrys.
Pieces of Wales quite literally became Wales again.
Mapping the Country
The slate became a map.
I wanted the viewer to be able to look beneath Emrys and recognise the shape of the country upon which his entire story rests.
But, as usual, simply outlining Wales wasn't enough for me.
I divided the map into six territories, giving the landscape another historical layer.
The coastline was picked out using gold smalti, introducing another part of the country's mineral story.
Gold and Wales have a long relationship, from ancient exploitation of Welsh deposits to the continuing cultural fascination with Welsh gold.
Against the darkness of the slate, that gold does something visually beautiful.
But it also traces the boundary of the country.
A precious line around Wales.
Railways Across the Landscape
Then I started laying railway tracks across it.
The railways are important because Welsh industrial history cannot really be separated from transport.
Coal, iron, copper, slate and other materials were of little commercial value if they couldn't be moved.
Railways connected the mines and quarries to ports, towns and industries, and from there Welsh materials travelled far beyond the country.
So the steel tracks crossing Emrys's landscape are not simply decorative lines.
They are the arteries of industrial Wales.
They connect places.
They carry resources.
They represent movement both within Wales and out into the wider world.
And visually, they allow the industrial story running through Emrys to spread across the country beneath him.
Castles — Beautiful and Complicated
Then came the castles.
Thirteen of them.
Castles are almost impossible to separate from the visual identity of Wales.
They dominate hillsides, coastlines and towns. We photograph them, visit them, preserve them and proudly point them out to visitors.
But they are not simply romantic ruins.
They represent power.
Conflict.
Occupation.
Resistance.
Control.
Different castles carry different stories, but collectively they remind us that the landscape of Wales has repeatedly been fought over.
That contradiction interested me.
Today we can stand in a ruined castle and admire its beauty.
Centuries ago, somebody looking at the same walls might have seen domination, defence or threat.
That is precisely the sort of contradiction I enjoy putting into my work.
Something can be beautiful and uncomfortable at the same time.
So the castles belong on Emrys not merely because Wales has a lot of them.
They are scars in the landscape that became monuments.
Stone Older Than the Stories
Amongst this miniature Wales are references reaching much further back.
Preseli bluestone.
Long before castles, railways or industrial Wales existed, stone from the Preseli Hills became part of one of Britain's most extraordinary prehistoric monuments: Stonehenge.
That connection fascinated me.
Here was Welsh material whose story stretched thousands of years into the past and far beyond the borders of Wales.
So Preseli stone became another layer within Emrys.
The further I researched, the more I realised that almost every material seemed capable of opening another door.
That was both wonderful and slightly dangerous.
Because every door led to another thing I wanted to put on the dragon.
Pig Iron and the Industrial Landscape
The base also carries references to the iron industry, including the story of pig iron and Merthyr Tydfil.
Merthyr became one of the great centres of iron production, its furnaces and works helping transform Wales during the Industrial Revolution.
I wanted that industrial power represented alongside the mines, railways and other elements already running through the sculpture.
Not because industry is the only story Wales has to tell.
Far from it.
But because it changed the physical landscape so dramatically that traces of it remain part of how many Welsh communities understand themselves today.
The valleys weren't simply scenery.
They were workplaces.
The mountains weren't simply beautiful.
They contained resources.
And the railway wasn't merely a picturesque journey through Wales.
It existed because things — and people — needed to move.
Emrys's landscape needed to acknowledge that.
A Country Beneath a Country
There is something I particularly enjoy about the base because it is easy to overlook.
Your eye naturally travels upwards.
Towards the dragon.
Towards his wings, his head, his scales and the enormous painted narratives covering him.
But look down and there is another story happening beneath everything else.
A country built from its own materials.
Crossed by its railways.
Marked by its castles.
Carrying its industries.
Layered with different periods of history.
Wales beneath Wales.
That is Emrys all over.
Every time you think you've reached the bottom of the story, there seems to be another layer underneath it.
The Landscape Is Part of the Dragon
The base was never simply somewhere for Emrys to stand.
Everything above it grows, in one way or another, from the country beneath him.
Its people.
Its industries.
Its conflicts.
Its stories.
Its imagination.
So when Emrys stands over that slate map, I don't see a dragon placed on top of Wales.
I see the two as inseparable.
The land supports the dragon because the land created the stories the dragon carries.
But there is still one enormous part of Emrys we haven't properly explored.
Look upwards.
Because his wings are doing far more than allowing a mythical creature to fly.
They contain engineering, ancient landscape, craftsmanship and light.
And, like almost everything else on Emrys, they began with another question:
How do you give Wales wings?
Chapter Seven
Giving Emrys Wings
A dragon without wings would have been rather disappointing.
But by this point in creating Emrys, simply giving him a pair of impressive-looking wings was never going to be enough.
They had to tell a story too.
The question was:
What could the wings say about Wales that I hadn't already said elsewhere?
I had used the body for people.
The legs connected to industry.
The ground beneath him had become the Welsh landscape.
So the wings gave me an opportunity to bring together something different.
Ancient Wales.
Engineering Wales.
Craftsmanship.
Movement.
And light.
An Aqueduct in a Dragon's Wing
One of the great structures incorporated into the wings is the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct.
I was fascinated by it.
Completed during the great age of canals and industry, the aqueduct carries the Llangollen Canal high above the River Dee. It is an extraordinary piece of engineering — elegant, ambitious and almost impossibly slender when you consider what it was designed to carry.
That combination appealed to me.
Strength without heaviness.
Engineering that could also be beautiful.
So I incorporated the aqueduct into Emrys's wings.
Within the sculpture, beaten copper forms the structure while blue steel represents the water travelling through it.
An industrial achievement becomes part of the anatomy of a mythical creature.
Which, when you think about it, is rather wonderfully absurd.
But it works.
The aqueduct allowed me to celebrate Welsh engineering without simply placing a little model of an engineering structure somewhere on the sculpture.
It became part of the dragon.
From Ancient Stone to Industrial Steel
But I didn't want the wings to belong entirely to industrial Wales.
Long before aqueducts, railways and furnaces, people were already changing the Welsh landscape.
Standing stones and ancient monuments remain scattered across Wales, physical reminders of people whose names and stories have largely disappeared.
We don't know everything they believed.
We don't know exactly what every stone meant.
And perhaps that uncertainty is part of their fascination.
So prehistoric standing stones also appear within the wings.
I loved placing them alongside the aqueduct.
One represents a world whose engineering and beliefs we are still trying to understand.
The other represents engineering that we can document in extraordinary detail.
Thousands of years apart.
Both created by human hands.
Both altering the landscape.
Both surviving long after their makers were gone.
Emrys could carry them together.
Little Pieces of Wales
The wings also became a place for smaller pieces of craftsmanship.
Handmade glass beads.
Copper.
Steel.
Enamelled copper coins.
Individually, these objects might appear decorative.
But within Emrys they contribute to the larger idea running throughout the sculpture — that a country isn't represented by one material, one period or one story.
It accumulates.
Ancient stone sits beside industrial metal.
Engineering sits beside craft.
History sits beside mythology.
Something monumental can sit beside something tiny enough to hold between your fingers.
I liked that mixture.
It stopped Emrys becoming too grand for his own good.
Why Coins?
Coins are particularly interesting objects to me because they carry so much information in such a tiny space.
Authority.
Identity.
Portraiture.
Value.
History.
A coin can pass through thousands of hands before disappearing into a drawer, the ground or a collection.
It travels.
And in a sculpture so concerned with people, industry, movement and identity, that seemed appropriate.
The enamelled copper coins became another detail that might initially be appreciated simply for their colour and form.
But, as always with Emrys, there is another story underneath.
Letting the Light Through
Perhaps the most important thing about the wings, however, is what isn't there.
Solid mass.
I wanted light to pass through them.
That decision changes the way the wings behave.
Emrys is an enormous, heavy sculpture constructed from materials associated with industry — steel, copper, slate and iron.
He could very easily have become visually oppressive.
The wings give him something else.
Air.
Space.
Transparency.
Light moves through the openings, catching metal, glass and enamel as the viewer changes position.
The sculpture changes with its surroundings.
For something weighing almost half a tonne, there is a strange delicacy there.
I like that contradiction.
A heavy dragon with wings made for light.
Wings Mean Something Anyway
There is, of course, an unavoidable symbolism attached to wings.
Freedom.
Escape.
Travel.
The ability to leave the ground and see the world from somewhere else.
I didn't need to force those meanings onto them.
They were already there.
Perhaps it is tempting to attach meaning retrospectively to every artistic decision, and I don't want to pretend that every element of Emrys arrived with some perfectly formed philosophical explanation.
Sometimes a wing is there because a dragon needs a wing.
But once an artwork exists, meanings can develop beyond the intentions of the artist who made it.
The viewer brings something to it.
Time brings something to it.
And sometimes events that happen later can make you look at something you created years earlier in an entirely different way.
Emrys's wings would eventually become one of those things for me.
But that belongs to another part of his story.
Wales Between the Wings
The wings became one of the places where the enormous timeline of Emrys could collapse.
Ancient standing stones could occupy the same structure as industrial engineering.
Traditional materials could sit beside glass.
Copper could become architecture.
Steel could become water.
And light could move through all of it.
That is what I wanted throughout Emrys.
Not a sequence of isolated historical exhibits.
Connections.
One Wales touching another.
Past touching present.
Industry touching mythology.
Something ancient sitting comfortably beside something comparatively modern because both have become part of the same national story.
But there is another part of Emrys that carries the idea of movement much further.
His tail.
And when we follow it, the story begins to travel beyond Wales altogether.
Because Welsh identity did not remain contained within the country's borders.
Welsh people carried language, culture, traditions and a sense of Wales with them across the world.
So part of Emrys had to leave Wales too.
Next: The Tail — Wales Beyond Wales
Chapter Eight
The Tail — Wales Beyond Wales
Emrys's tail carries another part of the Welsh story.
The Wales that left Wales.
For generations, Welsh people have travelled far beyond the country's borders, carrying language, traditions, stories, memories and identity with them.
I wanted that movement represented somewhere within Emrys.
The tail seemed strangely appropriate.
It stretches away from the body.
It reaches beyond it.
And yet, wherever it goes, it remains attached.
So while much of Emrys looks inward at the country itself, his tail looks outward.
Towards the Welsh people who left.
Towards the communities they created elsewhere.
And towards the question of what happens to identity when home is thousands of miles away.
A Country That Travelled
Welsh history does not stop at the Welsh border.
For generations, Welsh people have left their homeland and travelled across the world — sometimes through choice, sometimes through necessity — taking pieces of Wales with them.
Language.
Traditions.
Music.
Religion.
Stories.
Names.
Memories.
Identity.
We tend to think of a country as something contained within lines on a map.
But people don't remain conveniently inside those lines.
They move.
They settle.
They create families and communities elsewhere.
And sometimes the culture they carry with them survives thousands of miles from the place where it began.
That fascinated me.
Because it raises a much bigger question:
Where does a country actually live?
Is it in the land?
The people?
The language?
The memories?
Or can you carry a little piece of it with you wherever you go?
Patagonia — A Little Wales Far Away
One of the most extraordinary stories of Welsh migration took me to Patagonia.
In 1865, Welsh settlers sailed aboard the Mimosa to Argentina with the hope of establishing a community where their Welsh language and culture could survive.
Imagine leaving everything familiar behind.
Crossing an ocean.
Arriving in an entirely different landscape.
And then trying to preserve a little piece of Wales on the other side of the world.
The story inevitably resonated with me.
I was researching it while living in New Zealand, thousands of miles from the country of my own birth, and perhaps that distance made me look at the story differently.
It made me wonder whether leaving a country necessarily means leaving your connection to it behind.
Perhaps you can leave the country.
But the country doesn't always leave you.
What Do We Take With Us?
When you emigrate, you can't take the landscape.
You cannot pack Yr Wyddfa into a suitcase.
A Welsh castle would cause considerable trouble at customs.
And transporting a coal mine seems unnecessarily ambitious, even by my standards.
So what do we take?
We take the things that don't require luggage.
Language.
Memory.
Tradition.
Stories.
Identity.
Sometimes those connections weaken over generations.
Sometimes they survive.
And sometimes distance actually makes them stronger.
That is what interested me about the Welsh diaspora.
Welshness had travelled.
It existed in communities far beyond Wales because people continued to carry it, practise it and pass it on.
Croeso i Gymru
The tail doesn't only look outwards.
On its opposite side are the words:
Croeso i Gymru.
Welcome to Wales.
I love the relationship between those two ideas.
One side acknowledges the people who left.
The other welcomes people in.
Because a country is never completely static.
People leave.
People return.
Others arrive.
Communities change.
Culture evolves.
Yet something continues to connect one generation with another.
Perhaps identity isn't something we simply inherit.
Perhaps it is something we continually carry, question, rediscover and pass on.
A Language That Travelled Too
One of the most precious things Welsh emigrants carried with them was Cymraeg.
Language is much more than a collection of words.
Within it are songs, jokes, poetry, place names, expressions and ways of understanding the world that have travelled from one generation to another.
Lose a language and you don't simply lose another way of saying the same thing.
You lose part of the memory of a people.
The Welsh language has endured enormous pressures throughout its history, yet it survives — both within Wales and, remarkably, in communities far beyond it.
That seemed entirely appropriate within the story of Emrys.
Again and again during my research I encountered something threatened with disappearing that somehow remained.
A language.
A story.
A tradition.
An identity.
Something stubbornly surviving.
Very Welsh.
The Tail That Remains Attached
There is something rather fitting about putting migration on a dragon's tail.
A tail stretches away from the body.
It follows behind.
It can reach far beyond the centre.
But it remains attached.
That became a beautiful metaphor for the people who leave their homeland.
Distance can change your relationship with where you came from.
Sometimes enormously.
But leaving doesn't necessarily sever the connection.
You can live thousands of miles away and still find yourself moved by a landscape you cannot see, a language you may not speak, a song you haven't heard for years or stories told by people who died long before you were born.
Distance does not necessarily mean disconnection.
Wales Beyond Wales
The tail became my way of acknowledging that Wales exists beyond its own geography.
It travels through people.
Through language.
Through music.
Through traditions.
Through stories.
Through memory.
People leave, generations pass and distances become enormous, yet fragments of identity can survive in places thousands of miles from where they began.
When I created this part of Emrys, I thought I was telling the story of other Welsh people who had carried Wales into the wider world.
I couldn't have known then that, years later, I would look at the tail rather differently.
But that story belongs elsewhere.
For now, there are still hundreds of details hiding across Emrys that we haven't discovered.
Amongst all the grand history, mythology and industrial symbolism are much smaller stories.
People hiding where you might not expect them.
Private jokes.
Cultural references.
Tiny details that can disappear completely within the scale of the finished sculpture.
Next: The Things You Might Never Notice
It's time to go hunting through Emrys.
Chapter Nine
The Things You Might Never Notice
Emrys is enormous.
And strangely, that makes some of my favourite parts of him very easy to miss.
When you first encounter the sculpture, your eye naturally takes in the dragon as a whole — the wings, the copper, the painted panels, the sheer scale of him.
But Emrys was never really designed to be understood from a distance.
You have to get nosy.
Look between things.
Read the names.
Peer into the paintings.
Follow the railways.
Examine the industrial landscape.
Because amongst all the serious Welsh history, mythology and symbolism, I allowed myself to have some fun.
There are little surprises everywhere.
Some are tributes.
Some are cultural references.
Some connect completely different parts of Welsh history.
And some are there simply because they made me smile.
Idris Found a Dragon
We've already met one of the smallest inhabitants of Emrys.
Hidden amongst the industrial chimneys is Idris, the little dragon from Ivor the Engine.
I couldn't resist him.
Ivor the Engine occupies a completely different world from the heavy industrial history represented around him, but that is precisely why he belongs there.
Railways are part of Welsh industrial history.
But for generations of children they can also mean something entirely different.
Ivor.
The Grumbley and District Choral Society.
A little green locomotive wandering around the Welsh hills.
And, of course, a dragon living in his firebox.
That is also part of Welsh cultural memory.
So amongst the furnaces, steel, mining and industry sits this tiny reference to childhood.
You could easily miss him.
I rather hope some people do.
Because discovering him is much more fun than being told where to look.
Famous Faces in Very Strange Places
The copper scales aren't the only place where Welsh personalities appear.
Some found their way directly into the painted narratives.
This gave me an opportunity to do something I particularly enjoyed — allowing recognisable people from modern Wales to wander into ancient Welsh stories.
Within my interpretation of The Dream of Rhonabwy, for example, you can find Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins and Dylan Thomas occupying the same visual world.
Historically accurate?
Obviously not.
Deliberate?
Absolutely.
I wasn't attempting to create archaeological reconstructions.
These were my visual retellings of stories that had themselves travelled through generations before reaching me.
So occasionally I allowed different periods of Welsh culture to collide.
A legendary world could contain a familiar face.
A historical personality could become part of another story.
And suddenly somebody looking at the painting might experience that lovely moment of recognition:
Hang on. Is that who I think it is?
Yes.
It probably is.
Why Hide Them?
I could have made every reference obvious.
I could have labelled everything.
I could have produced a dragon that behaved rather like a museum display, with every symbol neatly explained beside it.
But where is the fun in that?
I wanted Emrys to reward curiosity.
There is a difference between being shown something and discovering it.
Discovery creates a little relationship between the viewer and the artwork.
You notice something.
You question it.
You look again.
Perhaps you recognise the reference immediately.
Perhaps you have absolutely no idea what it means and decide to investigate.
Either response is fine with me.
The important thing is that you looked twice.
Serious Doesn't Have to Mean Solemn
Emrys deals with subjects that deserve respect.
War.
Conquest.
Industry.
Dangerous working conditions.
Language.
National identity.
Migration.
Religion.
Loss.
But I never believed that meant every inch of the sculpture had to behave itself.
Wales isn't solemn.
Welsh culture is filled with humour, eccentricity, music, storytelling and an ability to laugh even when things are difficult.
I wanted some of that personality inside Emrys too.
Otherwise I would have created a monument that people admired from a respectful distance.
I wanted something they explored.
Something capable of making somebody think deeply in one area and grin in another.
That combination feels much more human to me.
Stories Inside Stories
The more I worked on Emrys, the more the sculpture began behaving like a collection of stories inside other stories.
A person engraved on a scale might have their own extraordinary history.
A castle on the base might lead to a prince, a battle or an invasion.
A railway might lead to an industry.
A tiny piece of stone might lead back thousands of years.
A character inside a painting might belong simultaneously to Welsh mythology and contemporary Welsh culture.
Everything seemed capable of opening another door.
And behind that door was usually another one.
This became both the joy and the danger of creating Emrys.
Research is not particularly helpful when you are trying to finish something.
You discover one fascinating fact and think:
I'll just look into that.
Three hours later you have somehow acquired another Welsh person, two legends, an industrial process and something else you desperately want to squeeze onto the dragon.
There was always more.
The Details That Belong to Me
Some choices within Emrys have enormous national significance.
Others are much smaller and more personal.
I think both matter.
Because Emrys was never intended to be an official monument commissioned to provide a perfectly balanced account of Welsh history.
He is an artist's interpretation.
My interpretation.
That means my curiosity is visible.
My humour is visible.
The things that fascinated me are visible.
Even the things I found absurd or irresistible found their way in.
Another artist could have researched Wales for the same length of time and created an entirely different dragon.
That is exactly as it should be.
Art doesn't simply reveal its subject.
It reveals something about the person doing the looking.
You Will Never See Everything at Once
That may be one of the reasons I still enjoy Emrys.
There is no single viewpoint from which everything can be understood.
You have to move around him.
Step back.
Come closer.
Look underneath.
Look through the wings.
Read the scales.
Study the paintings.
And even then, you will probably miss something.
I spent two and a half years putting these details into him.
I'm not going to make them all easy for you.
Some deserve to be hunted.
An Invitation to Look Again
That is really what all these hidden details are about.
Looking again.
The first glance gives you the dragon.
The second gives you Wales.
After that, you begin finding people, industries, legends, landscapes, humour, history and tiny fragments of cultural memory.
And eventually you begin making your own connections between them.
That is when Emrys becomes something more than an object to stand in front of.
He becomes something to explore.
But there is one part of his story that wasn't hidden in copper, slate or paint.
It happened after I had finished making him.
A series of extraordinary events involving people I had never met would change the future of the sculpture completely.
The dragon born in New Zealand was about to travel halfway around the world.
And I couldn't do it alone.
Next: The Dragon Goes Home
Sometimes the most extraordinary part of an artwork's story begins after the artist puts down her tools.
We've travelled around Emrys, looked beneath his feet, through his wings, across his skin and into the stories hidden throughout him.
But there is another story I haven't told here.
Mine.
Emrys was created in New Zealand, thousands of miles from Wales.
But behind the dragon was another journey — one involving identity, belonging, distance and a connection to Wales that I was only beginning to understand.
And when Emrys was finally finished, neither his journey nor mine was over.
Continue to Journal Two — The Dragon That Found His Way Home
Emrys the Great Welsh Dragon Sculpture
"The full journey of Emrys—from the first sketches, through the symbolism hidden within every detail, to the story of how he found his home in Wales—is documented in the accompanying book, Emrys the Great Welsh Dragon."
The Great Welsh Dragon | Welsh Mythology and Art join us as we explore the legendary tales within this captivating book "Emrys - the Great Welsh Dragon"
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