Naomi Heath

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I am the listening artist. A community based artist, living on relational threads, shaped by the environment it creates. Deeply influenced by care. I hold creativity as exploration. Welsh, a smaller language, sits underneath my practice, shaping perspective, understanding, connection. It’s a language that connects me to the landscape. I am it, it is me and us.

Over the years, my method has stayed the same even as the work has moved through different forms. I listen. I run in joy and sit with grief. I witness stories and then I share them back into the world in different ways. When you truly listen, you learn the art of care.

I started working with farmers through Cymylau Tystion over 15 years ago co-creating artworks that toured across Europe. They panicked when I told them that I didn’t know what we would make. The farmers made zoetropes then brought in their lives and objects. I witnessed the link between language, place and cynefin. The work formed through that exchange. That exhibition was about the art of community helping one another, a living archive of identity. My gift is moving with people and supporting that to happen.

After that I worked on a small language festival, then within Capital of Culture TOSTA as a curator, supporting international exchange through smaller language and visual art. By continuing to connect I found threads to make work that supported isolated small language communities reach across tides.

My practice widened into ecology, environment and community work. I care about the link between linguistic diversity and biodiversity. On residency with Ynys Enlli, I turned cattle feeders into a disco space with an Irish artist. With Inseperability of Nature in collaboration with Joanna Bond I turned polytunnels into a spa for women at lunch. Because creativity can be hilarious. It’s also how you end up in a bath with over 4 performers in an organic veg farm.

I have made site-specific performance and engagement work. I have worked with Marc Rees in Aberystwyth as an engagement producer for Aberetwm. I have also worked in conservation and designing engagement pop-up exhibitions around flood planning for environmental change. Making sustainability and non extraction a powerful space.

I’ve made street postcards and turned them into poetry, mapping places and linking them across other areas. I have worked in curatorial and facilitation roles including with Story Studios, where I co-created spaces using mapping and small exhibitions that supported community development with Bro and Severn Wye. My favorite piece was the villagers walking the area and listening to unheard sound.

More recently I worked on an Arts Council Wales project in a school setting. We used critique as a tool. We shifted from liking where we live to working with everyday heroes, redesigning the place we were in. That led to letters of funding and support. That’s the power of critique. If you want kids to be everyday heroes equip them with the tools to be that. Let them be their values and stand on their behalf. The Children’s Commissioner sent us a letter. Children cannot fix issues that affect us in ten years, it is us that has the power to change it. I use my role as a Community Artist to shift power back.

Everything I do comes back to people, and what can be made together. I bring joy and a sense of movement into those spaces. I stay with what happens when people are given space to shape their own stories. Then I close the loop and regenerate wandering over systems and sectors in a creative, place-based way.

Always making, always learning and always making change through relationship.

I listen.

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Below is the Artist Statement I wrote with a farmer and friend in a pub over ten years ago, its both the way I think and a testament to the power of sharing creativity.

ENG BELOW
Mae’n gas gyda fi wneud datganiadau artist. Â dweud y gwir yn onest, mae’n gas gyda fi eu darllen nhw hefyd. Ydych chi’n eu mwynhau nhw?

Rwyf fi’n gweithio fel artist achos fy mod i’n dwli ar gelf. Mae’n rhan ohonof fi. Hwn yw’n hanfod i. A’r unig beth rwyf fi’n gwybod amdano. Hanfod fy ngwaith yw ceisio cyfathrebu, yn eglur ac yn ddealladwy, heb fod yn nawddoglyd a heb eithrio neb.

Rwyf fi’n credu bod celf sy’n taro deuddeg yn cyrraedd pob un sydd â diddordeb. Ac i mi mae pethau fel ego ac ansicrwydd a hanes personol yr artist yn llyffethair i’r gwaith ac yn ddi-angen.

Rwyf fi’n artist sy’n gwrando, sy’n ystyried pobl a lle yn bethau pwysig iawn. Ieithoedd y pethau hyn, a’u hanesion, sy’n gyrru deinameg fy ngwaith. Dim ond ar ôl dod yn gynefin â nhw y byddaf yn penderfynu ar gyfrwng neu gyfryngau fy ymateb – ai ar ffurf barddoniaeth a pherfformiad ynteu fideo a sain, ar ffurfiau technolegol neu ddiwylliannol eraill ynteu ar gyfuniad o sawl un. Mae gwyddoniaeth, fel celf, yn destun rhyfeddod i mi, ac rwyf fi wrth fy modd yn gwneud defnydd o sgiliau gwyddoniaeth a thechnoleg yn fy ngwaith.

Rwyf fi’n artist dwyieithog, ac mae hynnu’n helpu fi i ddeall bod sawl haenen gwahanol o ganfyddiad i’w chael, a fel mae’r gwahanol ffyrdd o weld a deall y byd yn cyd-fyw. Ar ben hynny mae fy ymwybyddiaeth yn cynyddu o’r holl bethau nad all celf ddim â’i ddweud, ac o ba mor fawr yw’r cyfran hwnnw o unrhyw brofiad sydd y tu hwnt i allu celf i’w gyflwyno. O achos hynny rwyf fi’n hoffi dilyn trywydd sy’n defnyddio dwy iaith a sawl synnwyr, trywydd sydd o’r herwydd yn rhoi mwy o gyfle i ni ‘glywed‘ – i gymryd i mewn a threfnu, a gweld rheswm, yn y byd o’n cwmpas a’i brofiadau.Mae fy null gwaith yn un cydweithredol.

Rwyf fi’n gwybod o brofiad bod pobl yn dysgu mwy amdan eu hunain drwy gydwneud â phobl eraill na thrwy weithio ar eu pennau eu hunain. Mae diwylliant a chymuned yn bethau mor ddwys, mor amlochroga mor amlhaenog, fel bod gwahanol bersonoliaethau a’u ffyrdd gwahanol o weld y byd yn gallu agor ffenestri dealltwriaeth a chynnig ffyrdd ymlaen sydd nid yn unig yn newydd a dadlennol, ond sydd hefyd yn ddefnyddiol i’r rhai hynny sy’n dewis cydweithio.

Mae celf i mi’n beth syml, mewn sawl ffordd. Mae’n proses o ddysgu, o dyfu ac o roi, o gael eich harwain a’ch ysbrydoli gan bobl sy’n annwyl i chi, a gan bobl sy’n newydd i chi.Mae’n golygu hefyd ymateb yn onest, yn garedig ac yn haelionus i sefyllfaoedd a phobl, i lefydd a’u hanes. Mae’n golygu gwrthod cael eich caethiwo gan ragdybiaethau; a becso digon i weithio drwy’r dydd, bob dydd am wythnosau i greu rhywbeth yr ydych chi’n credu sy’n beth o werth, ac a fydd yn cyfoethogi bywydau pobl eraill. Ac mae’n golygu bod yn barod i wrthryfela.

Wele fi.

I hate writing artist’s statements. To be honest, I hate reading them too. Do you enjoy them?

I work as an artist because I love it. Art is embedded in me; it’s what I am, and it’s all I know. I just seek to communicate clearly and accessibly, without patronising or alienating anyone, at any stage in the process. I believe that if art’s good enough, it will reach anyone who’s interested. The artist’s ego, history and insecurities I see as unnecessary baggage.

I’m a listening artist, and people and places are very important to me. Their language and their narratives create the dynamics of my art. Only after getting a feel for these do I begin to decide what mediums I might use in response – perhaps poetry and performance, perhaps video and sound, perhaps other technologies or cultural forms. Perhaps a combination of several.

I’m a bilingual artist, and that helps me to understand how many different layers of perception exist, and how different ways of seeing and understanding exist alongside each other.

I’m increasingly aware too, of all the things art can’t say, and how much of any experience it just can’t catch. So I’m drawn to multi-sensory and bilingual approaches that give us more chance to ‘clywed’ – make sense of and categorise – the world and experiences round us.

I’m a collaborative artist. In my experience, people learn more about themselves by working together, than by working alone. Cultures and communities are so dense, multi-faceted and multi-layered that different personalities and patterns of perception can open up understandings, and offer useful ways forward, for all of us involved in a collaboration.

Art’s a simple thing to me, in many ways. It’s a process of learning and growing and giving, of being guided and inspired by people you love, and people you meet. It’s about responding honestly, kindly and generously to situations, people, places and their stories. About refusing to be trapped by preconceptions. About caring enough to work all day, for days and weeks, to create something you believe is worthwhile, and will enrich others. And about being willing to rebel.

That’s me.

What matters to me is place and culture, especially in rural settings, and a belief that art is a powerful way to listen. Stories shape the world/ I’m passionate about language: small languages, local stories, the names of fields and butterflies: because they hold the keys to identity and belonging. I bring my care of biodiversity and cultural diversity and place based understanding.

My approach is relational. I work with openness and joy, holding space for people to find their voice. I'm fearlessly caring and remind people that engagement is dialogue and we champion access, inclusion and sustainability especially when it is hard. 

I don’t see projects as something that end when funding ends. I stay in relationship with communities, supporting reflection, growth, and shared ownership over time. 

I have worked with thousands of people across Wales, community groups like metal detectorists, farmers, community hubs and so many more to co create work together. Sometimes in the street, sometimes in someone's house and even one time up a tree. We make together.