‘Hiraeth’ is a Welsh word that loosely translates as ‘Longing’. It is a visceral yearning not just for your home, not just your country, but for the Wales of the past. It is more than missing a culture, a language, a lifestyle, a stereotype or community – it is felt as the resonating, piercing call of the Land to the spirit, flesh and blood of its absent child. But how much is real? How many compartmentalised and idealised memories and false recollections haunt and taint lived experiences? This work seeks to explore the boundaries of fact and fiction in the Hiraeth, as experienced by a formerly absent son, by juxtaposing and interweaving sampled and synthesised image and sound in an immersive environment.
Richard T.C. Nelmes (born in 1985 in the former Mid Glamorgan) has recently embarked on a PhD in AudioVisual Sacred Music composition, under the supervision of Andrew Lewis at Bangor University, following a colourful time of reading Medicine, then Music, at Keele University. Whilst at Keele, Richard was honoured to collaborate with Diego Garro on the piece Visitation Adagio, which won the Visionen Visions 2012 Award at the Festival of Moving Sound and Visual Arts in Hannover.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.