Research projects
I have been associated with the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies in Aberystwyth since my first appointment there in 1999, and worked on a series of research projects there.
The ‘Visual Culture of Wales’ project was set up by the art historian Peter Lord at the Centre in 1996. The intention of the project was to publish a three-volume history of the visual culture of Wales from the early medieval period up until the 1950s. One of the conditions of the Arts Council Lottery Grant, which formed a significant part of the funding, was that a new media element was incorporated into the published outcomes. I was appointed to the Centre in 1999 to assist with the creation of a series of CD-ROMs, working with producer Will Howard as part of a small team.
Each of the CD-ROMs contained the whole text of the book with all of the images, as well as further original writing about aspects of the material with many further illustrations, audio, music and interviews. The first two CD-ROMs covering the modern period also included comprehensive artist biographies, with information about artists that was unique to the publications. The books and CD-ROMs were both published in Welsh and English editions.
The ‘Imaging the Bible in Wales’ project brought together work on the ‘Visual Culture of Wales’ with Biblical Studies, examining ways in which Biblical themes, subjects and characters have been expressed by visual artists in a variety of media. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the project was based at the University of Wales, Lampeter, from 2005–8.
Experience of working on the Visual Culture of Wales series proved that there was still much more work to be done and discoveries to be made in the field. Concentrating on just one theme and within a certain timespan – biblical images during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – produced a wealth of new and varied material, some of it of great quality and imagination.
Much of the material researched and recorded for the project was from places of worship in Wales. As both photographer and researcher for the project, several thousands of my photographs are now available on the online project database. The database was produced to my design with the specialist Nigel Callaghan. Working with Chris Gibson, I also wrote and produced a DVD-ROM Imaging the Bible in Wales based on the research undertaken with the Project Research Fellow John Morgan-Guy. This was published with the large multi-author volume Biblical Art from Wales (2010), which was edited by John Morgan-Guy with the project’s principal investigator, Martin O'Kane.
The ‘Stained Glass in Wales’ project ran from 2009 until 2011 at the Centre, and initially drew on the biblical stained glass of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, recorded while I was working on the ‘Imaging the Bible in Wales’ project between 2005 and 2008. This was expanded to include medieval stained glass and the work of more contemporary makers that was not necessarily biblical. After the end of the funding for this project, I continued to monitor the online catalogue on a voluntary basis, occasionally adding further photography as time permitted. Despite having no funding to do so, I continued to research stained glass in Wales as well as writing and producing my book, Stained Glass from Welsh Churches, was published in June 2014.
After this, and the other side of my three-year scholarship to undertake a doctoral project at the Centre, in November 2014 I began work part-time on the AHRC-funded ‘Cult of Saints in Wales’ project, in association with colleagues who were transcribing, editing and translating medieval Welsh prose, poetry and genealogies concerned with saints. I arranged project events and exhibitions, which I designed, for this project and a second project on the saints: ‘Vitae Sanctorum Cambriae: The Latin Lives of the Welsh Saints’, run in collaboration with the University of Cambridge. A further grant from the AHRC enabled a long-standing ambition to research and publish our ‘Seintiadur‘: an online portal for information about saints in Wales, with maps of dedications and place-names relating to saints in Wales, working with my colleague David Parsons. A new database of the imagery of saints in Wales was also launched, and I published a series of books and articles on the imagery of saints in Wales. These online resources remain works in progress, as new material is added.
From 2019 until 2023 I was part of the international project team working on the ‘Ports, Past and Present‘ project, which focused on the port towns of the Irish Sea that connected Wales and Ireland. This involved design and curation of a series of exhibitions in Ireland and Wales with colleagues at the Centre, and the design of numerous publications. I continued to research stained glass, writing a series of online articles on saints and stained glass for the project, and publishing studies of stained glass in Fishguard and Holyhead.
In 2023 I received a small amount of funding to scope new work on the Stained Glass Archive at Swansea College of Art. In 2024–5, I recorded and catalogued hundreds of stained glass panels with the artist Christian Ryan, who had studied stained glass at Swansea, and also taught there for a time, as well as undertaking numerous commissions. This was published online, incorporating some of the research undertaken by Marilyn Griffiths around ten years previously, which had never been published.
I was awarded a substantial research grant in 2025 for 'The Significance of Stained Glass' project. This will provide the opportunity to add hundreds more windows to the 'Stained Glass in Wales' catalogue, and to create a new 'Stained Glass North West' catalogue. Drawing on this broad-based fieldwork, a series of case studies will inform the way that the significance of stained glass is evaluated when prioritising conservation and preservation of windows that are at risk.
I am also assisting with other research projects at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies. This currently includes the Curious Travellers project, and I am working with my colleague Jenny Day on a project about the medieval poet Gutun Owain.