Article written for Alpinist magazine 68...

 

Clogwyn Du’r Arddu, affectionately known as “Cloggy” to local climbers, has a special place at the heart of the Welsh climbing community. The towering pinnacles and faces of this crag, covered with adventurous classic routes, can be spotted from the mountain town of Llanberis, at the foot of Snowdon. With this drawing, I was looking to capture the multilayered nature of our experiences as climbers within the mountains. The detailed ink drawing at the forefront recalls the memory: the lines in the rock suggest the general shape of a lived experience that is already vanishing into the past. The map beneath represents the moments before, the buildup to the experience the planning stages of anticipation. The actual nature of the experience, so fleeting and transient, may not be possible to capture—it is never quite as we imagined, and it is never remembered exactly as it was. The writer or artist is faced with an impossible task—to distill a palimpsest of successive moments into something ultimately motionless and singular. My map drawings are an effort to try and breach these limitations.