The Dragon That Found His Way Home | Emrys by Julia O'Sullivan
- Julia O'Sullivan of Jupigio-Artwork
- 2 days ago
- 17 min read
Emrys
The Dragon That Found His Way Home
Emrys, Hiraeth and My Journey Back to Wales
The Great Welsh Dragon — Journal 2
Finding Home Through Art: The Journey of Emrys and Me
Chapter Ten
The Dragon That Found His Way Home
There are two stories inside Emrys.
The first is the one I deliberately created.
The Welsh history, mythology, people, industry and landscape that I spent two and a half years building into a dragon.
You have already explored that story.
The second is one I could never have designed.
It happened to us afterwards.
When I began creating Emrys in New Zealand, I had no idea that one day he would travel thousands of miles across the world and find a permanent home in Wales.
I didn't know that people I had never met would enter his story.
I didn't know that extraordinary acts of generosity would help carry him home.
And I certainly didn't know that the journey of the dragon would eventually mirror so much of the reason I had created him in the first place.
Emrys had been born from my search for Wales.
Now Wales was about to come looking for Emrys.
What Do You Do With a Dragon?
Finishing Emrys presented a rather substantial problem.
What on earth was I going to do with him?
This wasn't a painting I could hang on a wall.
He was enormous.
He was heavy.
He was complicated.
And he was sitting in New Zealand, thousands of miles from the country whose story covered almost every inch of him.
I had spent two and a half years researching Wales, constructing Emrys and obsessing over details most people would probably never notice.
Then suddenly the work was finished.
I had created my monument to Wales.
But Wales couldn't see it.
There was something rather sad about that.
Emrys made sense in New Zealand because that was where I had created him, but in another way he didn't belong there at all.
Everything about him looked towards Wales.
His history was Welsh.
His mythology was Welsh.
His people were Welsh.
His industries were Welsh.
The country itself lay beneath his feet.
He was a Welsh dragon living in exile.
Rather familiar territory for me.
Then Came a Newspaper Article
In 2017, something happened that changed the direction of Emrys's story.
He appeared in the Western Mail.
Somewhere in Swansea, a man called Phil saw the article.
Phil didn't know me.
I didn't know Phil.
But he saw Emrys and decided that this dragon should be in Wales.
That decision would eventually set in motion a chain of events I could never have predicted.
This is one of the things that still amazes me about the whole story.
You create something privately.
You spend years inside your own imagination, wondering whether anyone else will understand what you're trying to do.
Then you release it into the world.
And occasionally it reaches exactly the right person.
Phil contacted me.
And rather than simply saying how much he liked the sculpture and disappearing again, he wanted to help.
He wanted to bring Emrys home.
The Kindness of People Who Owed Me Nothing
Phil and Rosan became part of Emrys's story.
And through them, other people did too.
That matters to me enormously.
Because none of these people owed me anything.
This wasn't their sculpture.
It wasn't their responsibility to solve the problem of a Welsh artist sitting in New Zealand with a very large dragon that really belonged on the other side of the world.
They could quite easily have admired him and carried on with their lives.
They didn't.
People offered help.
Connections were made.
Problems that had seemed impossible began to have solutions.
The story expanded beyond me.
And there is something wonderfully appropriate about that.
I had created Emrys as a celebration of Wales and its people.
His skin was literally covered with their names.
Then, after I had finished creating him, another group of Welsh people stepped forward and became part of the dragon's story themselves.
Not because I chose them.
Because they chose Emrys.
Getting Him Home Was Another Matter
Of course, deciding that a dragon belongs in Wales and actually getting him there are two very different things.
Emrys wasn't exactly designed with international shipping in mind.
He needed somewhere to go.
He needed transporting.
He needed protecting.
He needed an enormous purpose-built crate.
And somehow this extraordinary, heavy, intricate object had to survive a journey halfway around the world.
For two and a half years, I had been responsible for every part of him.
If something needed fixing, I fixed it.
If something didn't work, I changed it.
If something broke, I dealt with it.
Now I was going to put him into the hands of other people and hope.
That was terrifying.
Packing Away Two and a Half Years
Eventually, the moment came.
Emrys was packed into his specially constructed crate.
There is something very strange about watching an artwork that has dominated your life disappear into a box.
For two and a half years, Emrys had occupied not only physical space but mental space.
I woke up thinking about him.
I went to bed thinking about him.
There was always another problem to solve, another piece to make, another detail to research or another idea demanding to be squeezed somewhere onto his increasingly crowded body.
And then there was nothing left to do.
The dragon disappeared into his crate.
I could no longer touch him.
I couldn't check every part.
I couldn't protect him.
I simply had to trust that the next time the crate opened, Emrys would still be Emrys.
I would love to tell you that I watched him leave with serene artistic acceptance.
I didn't.
I worried.
A lot.
The Welsh Dragon Crosses the World
And so the journey began.
A Welsh dragon conceived and created in New Zealand was travelling towards a country he had never actually seen.
There is an irony in that which only became apparent to me afterwards.
I had already built the story of Welsh migration into Emrys's tail.
I had explored the idea that people can leave Wales and carry pieces of their country with them wherever they go.
Without realising it, I had created exactly that.
Emrys had spent his entire existence outside Wales while carrying Wales inside him.
Now he was doing something different.
He was going home.
In 2018, after travelling across the world, Emrys finally arrived in Wales. The journey recorded in the story of the sculpture took him from his creation in New Zealand to Swansea, where a permanent future was waiting for him.
Home Before Me
There is one part of that story that still feels particularly poignant.
Emrys made it home before I did.
The dragon I had created while trying to understand my own connection to Wales had physically returned to the country while I was still living on the other side of the world.
I couldn't have planned that.
I couldn't have written it into the sculpture.
Life did it for me.
And perhaps that is why I now see Emrys differently.
When I finished him, I thought the artwork was complete.
Physically, it was.
But its story wasn't.
The people who helped him became part of it.
His journey became part of it.
Where he eventually came to rest became part of it.
The artwork continued accumulating meaning without me adding another piece of copper.
Swansea
Emrys eventually found his permanent home at Swansea University.
And Swansea could hardly have been more appropriate.
This is a dragon whose body carries the story of Welsh copper, and Swansea was once at the heart of one of the world's great copper-smelting industries — the Copperopolis I had encountered during my research.
Now my copper-covered dragon had returned from New Zealand and ended up in Swansea.
Another circle I hadn't deliberately drawn had somehow closed itself.
People could finally walk around him in Wales.
Read the names.
Examine the paintings.
Look beneath his feet.
Find the hidden details.
Perhaps recognise somebody.
Perhaps discover something they didn't know.
Perhaps simply stand back and think:
That's one enormous dragon.
All of those responses are perfectly acceptable.
They Became Part of Emrys
I wanted the people who helped bring Emrys home to remain connected to him.
Their contribution wasn't merely logistical.
Without people deciding that this strange Welsh dragon mattered enough to help, his story could have ended very differently.
Their names became part of the wooden plinth beneath Emrys, permanently recording their part in bringing him home.
I find that incredibly fitting.
Emrys began as an artwork about people I discovered through research.
Then real people walked into his story and changed his future.
The sculpture had begun creating history of its own.
I Thought I Had Finished Him
That may be the greatest lesson in this part of Emrys's story.
Artists decide when an artwork is finished.
We put down the brush.
Stop hammering the copper.
Take the final photograph.
Sign the work.
And think:
Done.
But perhaps there are two kinds of finished.
There is the moment when you stop making the object.
And there is the story the object goes on to have without you.
I finished making Emrys in New Zealand.
But Emrys wasn't finished becoming what he would eventually mean.
He still had an ocean to cross.
People to meet.
A country to return to.
And somewhere amongst all of that, the dragon I had spent years filling with pieces of Wales began giving something back to me.
I had made Emrys a home.
Then Emrys began helping me understand what home meant.
Chapter Eleven
What Emrys Gave Back to Me
For two and a half years, I poured everything I could find about Wales into Emrys.
History.
Mythology.
People.
Industry.
Landscape.
Stories.
And somewhere amongst all that research, copper, steel, slate and paint, something happened that I hadn't expected.
The dragon began giving something back.
When I started Emrys, I thought I was creating a monument to Wales.
Looking back, I think I was also trying to repair a connection within myself.
I just didn't know it yet.
The People I Never Knew
One of the most powerful parts of creating Emrys was the number of people I encountered along the way.
Not physically.
Most of them were long gone.
I met them through history.
Miners and quarrymen.
Poets and writers.
Princes and rebels.
Inventors and industrialists.
Musicians and actors.
Ordinary people living through extraordinary periods of change.
The deeper I went, the less history felt like a collection of dates and events.
These had been people's lives.
They had loved.
Worked.
Struggled.
Raised families.
Lost people.
Argued.
Laughed.
Survived.
And somewhere amongst those generations were my own ancestors.
I may never know the details of many of their lives.
But through Emrys I began to understand something of the world in which they had lived.
That mattered to me enormously.
My Ancestors Did Not Live Alone
Before Emrys, I suppose I thought about ancestry in the obvious way.
A family tree.
One generation leading backwards into another.
Names.
Births.
Marriages.
Deaths.
But that isn't really how we exist.
My ancestors weren't simply names connected by lines.
They lived amongst other people.
They worked within communities.
They experienced political decisions, wars, industries, poverty, religion, celebrations and disasters.
They heard the stories being told around them.
They walked through Welsh landscapes that generations before them had already changed.
They were part of something much larger than a family tree.
And therefore, so am I.
That realisation gave me a connection I had struggled to find elsewhere.
The Runt Found a Much Bigger Family
For much of my life, I had felt like the runt of the litter.
Slightly outside.
Never completely sure where I fitted.
That feeling doesn't magically disappear because you build a dragon.
Emrys didn't rewrite my past.
He didn't repair difficult relationships.
He didn't suddenly make everything that had hurt disappear.
But he did give me another way of understanding where I belonged.
I had spent years thinking about belonging in terms of being accepted by other people.
Emrys changed that.
My connection to Wales didn't require anybody's permission.
Nobody had to invite me in.
Nobody could decide whether I was sufficiently part of it.
I came from generations of people who had occupied this country before me.
Their country was part of my story whether anyone acknowledged that connection or not.
For someone who had spent so much of her life feeling outside, that was incredibly powerful.
I had found something I couldn't be excluded from.
I Didn't Discover a Perfect Wales
I should probably make something very clear.
Researching Emrys did not lead me to some rose-tinted version of Wales where everyone sang beautifully on mountainsides while dragons flew overhead.
Thank goodness.
I would have become bored very quickly.
The Wales I discovered was complicated.
Beautiful and brutal.
Inventive and destructive.
Proud and wounded.
There were remarkable achievements alongside terrible suffering.
There were people I admired and people whose actions horrified me.
There were invasions, rebellions, exploitation, poverty, industrial disasters and enormous social change.
There was humour.
Poetry.
Music.
Stubbornness.
Survival.
Contradiction everywhere.
And perhaps that made my connection stronger.
I didn't need Wales to be perfect in order to love it.
I needed it to be real.
Emrys Became Proof
There is another thing the dragon gave me.
Evidence.
Even now, I can look at Emrys and wonder how on earth all of that came out of me.
Not because I have forgotten making him.
Quite the opposite.
I remember the work.
The frustration.
The problems.
The endless research.
The ideas that worked beautifully in my head and considerably less beautifully once I attempted to make them exist in the real world.
But I kept going.
One decision led to another.
One story led to another.
One piece of copper became hundreds.
One idea became a sculpture almost half a tonne in weight.
I didn't know every answer when I started.
I didn't need to.
I learnt.
I experimented.
I solved problems.
I changed things.
I swore at things.
And eventually the creature that had existed in my imagination was standing in front of me.
Emrys became physical proof that I was capable of taking an idea that seemed completely ridiculous in scale and seeing it through.
That changed something in me too.
When an Artwork Stops Belonging Only to You
At some point, Emrys stopped feeling entirely mine.
I can't tell you exactly when.
Perhaps it happened when hundreds of Welsh names began covering his body.
Perhaps when people became involved in bringing him home.
Perhaps when he arrived in Wales.
But gradually I realised that although I had created him, I wasn't going to be the only person deciding what he meant.
Someone might stand beside Emrys and recognise the name of a person they admire.
Someone else might recognise a castle.
A family with generations of mining history might respond to his legs.
A Welsh speaker might connect with something entirely differently from someone discovering Wales for the first time.
A child might ignore all my painstaking historical research and become completely obsessed with finding Idris.
And that's fine.
Actually, it's more than fine.
That's what I want.
Once an artwork enters the world, people bring their own lives to it.
The conversation is no longer one-sided.
I Put Wales Into Emrys
When I began creating the dragon, I was trying to gather Wales together.
As much as I could possibly fit.
Its people.
Its history.
Its legends.
Its industries.
Its landscape.
Its achievements.
Its suffering.
Its humour.
Its contradictions.
Its stories.
I put Wales into Emrys.
But after everything that happened, I realised something.
Emrys had put Wales back into me.
That is perhaps the simplest way I can explain what those two and a half years gave me.
The connection I had been searching for wasn't waiting at the end of the project.
It had been forming slowly throughout it.
Every person I researched.
Every story I discovered.
Every name I etched.
Every historical event I tried to understand.
Every Welsh material I incorporated.
Piece by piece, I wasn't only constructing a dragon.
I was constructing a relationship with where I came from.
The Creator Was Being Changed Too
We talk a great deal about what art does to the viewer.
What does it communicate?
What does it make someone feel?
What conversation does it create?
But making art can change the artist too.
You cannot spend years immersed in an idea without something rubbing off.
At least I can't.
Emrys changed the way I thought about heritage.
He changed the way I thought about ancestry.
He changed the way I thought about Wales.
And perhaps most importantly, he changed the way I thought about belonging.
I had spent so long feeling that belonging was something other people granted you.
Now I understood it differently.
Sometimes belonging comes from knowing where you stand within a much bigger story.
And Then I Followed Him
Emrys went home before I did.
There is something almost absurdly appropriate about that.
I had created a Welsh dragon in New Zealand while trying to reconnect with Wales.
Then the dragon crossed the world and reached Wales while I remained behind.
But eventually, after sixteen years in New Zealand, I came home too.
The dragon had made the journey first.
I followed.
I don't pretend that returning to Wales suddenly answered every question about who I am or where I belong.
Life isn't that tidy.
Neither am I.
But I came back with something I hadn't possessed when I left.
A much deeper understanding of what Wales meant to me.
Not an idealised country.
Not simply the place where I happened to be born.
Something much more complicated.
An origin.
The Love Affair
Perhaps that is why I still struggle to explain Emrys simply as a sculpture.
Too much happened through him.
He began as research.
Then became an obsession.
Then a dragon.
Then a monument.
Then an emigrant.
Then, somehow, a way home.
And even 2.8 metres of dragon wasn't large enough to contain everything I had discovered.
There were too many stories.
Too much history.
Too much mythology.
Too many extraordinary people.
Too many things I wanted to remember.
So I did what any sensible person would do after spending two and a half years creating an enormous Welsh dragon.
I wrote a book about him.
The Great Welsh Dragon Odyssey became the place where I could go further than the sculpture ever could.
The dragon holds the imagery.
The book holds the journey through the stories that inspired it.
But underneath both is something much simpler.
They document a period of my life when I went looking for the country I had left behind and discovered just how deeply it had remained inside me.
Emrys was my monument to my origins.
The book documents the love affair.
And perhaps that is the greatest thing Emrys gave back to me.
I began by creating something to tell the story of Wales.
By the end, Wales had helped me understand my own.
Chapter Twelve
The Story Became a Book
There was one rather obvious problem with Emrys.
He wasn't big enough.
Considering he stands 2.8 metres tall, that seems an extraordinary thing to say.
But it was true.
The more I researched Wales, the more stories I discovered. Every historical event seemed to lead somewhere else. Every person introduced another. Mythology opened doors into folklore, landscape and language.
I could keep adding things to the dragon, but eventually I had to stop.
There is, apparently, a limit to how much information you can attach to one enormous mythical creature.
So the stories needed somewhere else to go.
They became a book.
The Great Welsh Dragon Odyssey
The Great Welsh Dragon Odyssey grew alongside my fascination with Wales.
It allowed me to do something Emrys couldn't.
Slow down.
A sculpture communicates visually.
You might recognise a person, notice a symbol or discover a scene, but the artwork cannot sit beside you and explain everything that led me there.
The book can.
It allowed me to record the research behind the imagery and explore the history, mythology, people and places that had captured my imagination.
In many ways, Emrys and the book became companions.
The sculpture shows you the stories.
The book takes you inside them.
Falling Down the Welsh Rabbit Hole
Researching Wales became wonderfully dangerous.
You begin with one perfectly sensible question.
Then you discover a person.
That person leads to an event.
The event leads to a castle.
The castle leads to a prince.
The prince leads to a battle.
Somewhere along the way a mythical creature appears, somebody gets transformed into an animal and you've completely forgotten what you originally wanted to know.
I loved it.
The deeper I went, the more I realised how little I knew.
That became part of the pleasure.
I wasn't approaching Wales as a historian writing an academic account.
I was approaching it as an artist.
I wanted to understand enough to see it.
What would this story look like?
Which part of it mattered to me?
What symbol could carry it?
What would I put onto Emrys?
And what deserved more explanation than I could ever give it in paint, copper or steel?
The book became the answer.
The Mythology Deserved More Space
The Welsh legends were particularly difficult to contain.
The Mabinogion alone gave me an extraordinary world to explore.
Magic.
Betrayal.
Love.
War.
Revenge.
Transformation.
Giants.
Kings.
Impossible tasks.
People making spectacularly poor decisions.
I wanted the stories to be accessible rather than buried beneath intimidating language or treated as something belonging only to scholars.
These stories survived because people told them.
So I wanted to tell them again.
Not replace them.
Not claim my interpretation was definitive.
Simply take these extraordinary old tales, look at them through my own eyes and invite somebody else into them.
The paintings on Emrys give you glimpses.
The book allows you to stay awhile.
History Needed Room Too
The same was true of the historical side.
A battle painted onto Emrys might occupy only a small area.
But behind it could be years of conflict, political ambition, family relationships, shifting allegiances and consequences that changed Wales.
A castle might appear as a tiny structure on the base.
Behind it is another story.
A name engraved onto a scale might take seconds to read.
The life behind that name could fill a book of its own.
That is something Emrys taught me repeatedly:
nothing is ever just one thing.
Look closely enough and almost every detail becomes an entrance to something larger.
The book gave me somewhere to open those doors.
More Than a Catalogue
That is why I don't really think of The Great Welsh Dragon Odyssey simply as a catalogue of the sculpture.
It isn't a list of photographs explaining what each bit is.
It is the world from which Emrys emerged.
The research.
The discoveries.
The stories.
The mythology.
The history.
The people.
And the strange journey of creating something that gradually became far larger than the original idea.
If Emrys is the physical expression of my relationship with Wales, the book is the record of me exploring it.
A Love Affair With Wales
When I look back at the years in which Emrys and the book were created, I see them differently now.
At the time, I was simply following my curiosity.
One thing interested me, so I investigated it.
Then something else caught my attention.
And gradually I accumulated this enormous collection of stories.
But underneath all that research, something much more personal was happening.
I was falling in love with where I came from.
Not blindly.
Not with some romantic notion that everything Welsh was wonderful.
I had discovered far too much history for that.
I loved the complexity.
The mythology beside the fact.
The beauty beside the brutality.
The great names beside the ordinary people.
The achievements beside the disasters.
The ancient beside the modern.
The contradictions made Wales feel alive.
The book records that discovery.
If Emrys Has Made You Curious...
Perhaps you have reached the end of these journals knowing considerably more about a dragon than you expected to when you began.
Good.
That's rather the point.
But there is still much more.
If you've wondered about the stories painted across Emrys...
If you've spotted a name and wanted to know who it belongs to...
If the mythology has intrigued you...
If you want to understand more about the history, people, industries and ideas that inspired the sculpture...
...that is where The Great Welsh Dragon Odyssey takes over.
You don't need to know Welsh history before opening it.
You don't need to understand the Mabinogion.
You don't even need to be Welsh.
You only need to be curious.
The Dragon and the Book
Emrys now stands in Wales.
The book can travel anywhere.
I rather like that.
The dragon who migrated home remains there carrying his hundreds of stories, while the book can continue taking those stories out into the world.
Perhaps that completes another little circle.
I created both of them thousands of miles from Wales while trying to understand the country I had left behind.
One eventually carried those stories home.
The other continues carrying them beyond it.
Together they tell the same love story in two very different languages.
One in copper, steel, slate, glass and paint.
The other in words and photographs.
Emrys is my monument to Wales.
The Great Welsh Dragon Odyssey documents the love affair.
And if this journal has made you want to look a little closer at the dragon, discover another Welsh story, or question something you thought you already knew about Wales, then perhaps Emrys is still doing exactly what I hoped he would do.
Making people curious.
Making people look again.
And keeping the stories alive.
Continue the Journey
Explore The Great Welsh Dragon Odyssey to discover the history, mythology, people and stories behind Emrys in far greater depth.
Or, if you haven't already, visit Emrys — The Great Welsh Dragon at Swansea University and see how many of his stories you can find for yourself.
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