Cardiff
is blessed with some rather lovely public artworks, none more so than the Beastie Benches, a series of nine carved brick benches that can be found in the
Britannia Park and Quay area that runs along two sides of Roath Basin at
Cardiff Bay.
These
are the work of Welsh sculptor Gwen Heeney, a ceramics expert who specialises in working
with brick. Her raw materials, the terracotta bricks, came from Dennis of
Ruabon, the very same brick and tile company that supplied the decorative panels
for the Bay’s iconic Pierhead building more than a hundred years ago.
The
Beastie Benches are aptly named. The Beasts were inspired by the mythical creatures
brought to life in ‘The Ballad of the Long Legged Bait’, one of the most
well-known of famous Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’s poems. It’s a very long poem, too
long to reproduce in full in this post, but here’s a link if you fancy a read.
The poem’s subject matter has been much
discussed by critics since Thomas’s early death in 1953 at just 39 years of
age. With allusions to literary and scientific works and the Bible, with plays
on words and multiple layers of meaning, it may describe Thomas’s own voyage
through life, it could be about a series of sexual experiences and their
consequences, or it may relate to the search for salvation through the
mortification of the flesh.
Heeney
has taken lines and phrases from the poem and allowed her imagination to
transform these into the mythical creatures that now provide a welcome place to
sit on a sunny day. The names of the benches are fascinating enough in
themselves: The lured fish under the foam; Sing and howl through sand and
anemone; Thrown to the sea in the shell of a girl; Venus lies star-struck in
her wound; Bird after dark; and the laughing fish; In the continent of a fossil;
Turns the moon-chained and water-wound Metropolis of fishes; and There is
nothing left of the sea.
I dare you to sit on one of these and not be inspired to write your own poem or paint a vivid picture.
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| The lured fish under the foam |
 |
| Sing and howl through sand and anemone |
 |
| Thrown to the sea in the
shell of a girl |
 |
| Venus lies star-struck in
her wound |
 |
| Bird after dark (It seems the bird has been the subject of some after-dark shenanigans!) |
 |
| and the laughing fish |
 |
| In the continent of a
fossil |
 |
| Turns the moon-chained and
water-wound Metropolis of fishes |
 |
| There is nothing left of
the sea |
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