Cupid and the Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows

Cupid and The Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows, was a site-specific installation by Sophy Rickett, where photographs and text by the artist were installed alongside a partially restored painting from the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery Collection.

Originally attributed to the C17th artist Mario di Fiore (1603-1673), the painting has not been seen in public for decades, due to the layer of coal dust and dirt that has accumulated on its surface while it was stored, for many years, in a boiler house.

Rickett became interested in the thick layer of dirt as a subject in itself, imagining the connection between the film of coal dust that obscured the subject of the painting, and the dark smoke of the colliery mines that were intrinsic to life in this part of the world.

As part of her installation, and in dialogue with Jenny Williamson, Conservation Officer at Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Rickett requested that a small section of the painting be cleaned; a process which would partially remove one subject (the layer of smoke), to reveal another (the sleeping cupid).

The creation of a small test patch in a discrete corner of a painting is a normal part of the conservation process. What is unusual here is the positioning and shape of Williamson’s test patch. The circular motif, near the centre of the painting suggests a peephole, or the lens of a camera. It is a gestural flourish that that emphasises the subject (Cupid and his sleeping eye); a radical departure from the normal protocols of conservation technique.

Here – and in the other photographs and texts in the installation – history is understood as partial and incomplete. While the story of Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn and the legacy of her and her father John’s photographic archive were the starting point for the project, Rickett allows her own experience to influence the path of her ‘investigation’, and her primary research. Weaving together imagery and text, she adopts an idiosyncratic approach, that combines chance encounters, subjective memory and miscommunication with the facts that she uncovers through site visits and close readings of the historical material.

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