News Archive

The National Poet's Poem for Oriel Mostyn

The £5.1m renovation of Oriel Mostyn Art Gallery in Llandudno is now complete, and it re-opened to the public on 20 May 2010. The project involved new galleries, a café, a hands-on education room, a meeting room, a bigger and better shop and improved public facilities. There are some great architectural and design features: a large new gallery using a ‘saw-tooth’ roof to bring in natural light, oak floors in all the galleries and a landmark gold-coloured metal tiles on the building’s spire, to name a few.

As part of the opening celebrations, National Poet Gililan Clarke read a new poem dedicated to Oriel Mostyn Art Gallery:

The Tree
The architect’s vision, a space in the mind
before a line was drawn or walls imagined,
is a poem before sound, before words,
before the sea-lit ceilings shadowed by birds,
bare concrete printed with the memory
of trees that grew with a forest’s slow geometry.
Workmen have tapped things home with a final touch,
tuning the building to its perfect pitch.
Builders with art on their arms are done,
whistling brickies, carpenters, masons gone.
The tree, old yew, first to arrive in the gallery,
glorious, broken, bloody, ablaze, a glare
of flame alive in its dance of death,
art’s sign, and metaphor, and shibboleth.

Gillian Clarke
(‘Red Cuts’, by David Nash)