Borth Waters and the Coastal Dreaming of a Midlander

Abstract

After a critique of top-down colonizing attributes of water projects in the Arts and Humanities, the essay dwells on the communitarian, environmental, and aesthetic value of a short creative documentary about the raised marshland mire behind the ancient seaside village of Borth on the Mid-West Welsh coast. In a mode of theorized autobiography, it then divagates upon the metaphor of water in the author’s recurring dreams about this childhood holiday resort and its complex relations with his home in the English Midlands, an area supplied by Welsh water and that supplies many of Borth’s holiday-makers.

Author Biography

Richard Read, University of Western Australia

Richard Read is Emeritus Professor of Art History and a Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. He has published in major journals on the relationship between literature and the visual arts, nineteenth and twentieth-century European, American, and Australian art history, contemporary film, and complex images in global contexts. Two recent books have focused on the influence of theories of sensory perception on colonial landscape painting and sources of the concepts and consequences of the Anthropocene.

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Published
2022-07-11
How to Cite
Read, R. (2022). Borth Waters and the Coastal Dreaming of a Midlander. Changing Societies & Personalities, 6(2), 271–295. doi:10.15826/csp.2022.6.2.175
Section
Essays