At the beginning of my late twenties, I unexpectedly found myself living alone during a global pandemic. My interest in 'landscapes of the self' developed as I had to come to terms with my isolation. I imagined my inner life as a landscape, and I committed to tend and to care for it. Creativity – writing, painting and music – became integral parts of this nurturing, as well as getting to know the natural world around me and creating a pleasant, and safe, space for myself within the confines of my home.

View from a Window (Back Gardens, Pencraig)

I spent most of this period living in Caernarfon and Y Foryd (Foryd Bay) was at the core of my personal discovery of the landscape of self.

Despite being from the Vale of Clwyd in the north east, my mother's side of the family is from the north west of Wales. I have been raised travelling back and forth along the A55, and through the mountains of Eryri, to see my grandparents on the Llŷn Peninsula. The striking juxtaposition between the hills of the Clwydian Range, and the mountains and coastline of Gwynedd, have had a significant impact on me.

My personal experience of discovering the landscape of self has rooted and branched beyond the personal, and has led to a new appreciation of the works of two artists that have a close relationship to the landscape of the north west: Claudia Williams (1933–2024) and Brenda Chamberlain (1912–1971).

Claudia and Brenda overcame their constraints as women in the last century, and I'm interested in how they discovered and expressed the landscapes of their lives. With the support of original research by Robert Meyrick and Harry Heuser on the work of Claudia Williams, and Jill Piercy and Kate Holman on Brenda Chamberlain, I have nurtured a new understanding of the work of both artists. Here are two women that challenged what was possible for women to accomplish during their time, and they achieved this through prioritising their creativity and their careers as artists.

Professor Robert Meyrick noted that the work of Claudia Williams is optimistic and an inspiration to generations of young artists from Wales because she 'proved that it was possible to forge a career as a woman in Wales and to exhibit and be successful'. Claudia loved being a mum, but it restricted her to her home and from going to museums and galleries.

'Time was so precious,' shared Claudia, but she succeeded in expanding the landscape of her artistic life through pushing the boundaries of her home. She studied the works of other artists in art catalogues and books, and in The Carry Cot (1957), a warm painting portraying children playing with a baby, we see references to the work of artists Édouard Vuillard and Paula Modersohn-Becker.

In Self Portrait with Gwilym, we see Claudia portraying her husband, the artist Gwilym Pritchard (1931–2015), and herself painting side by side. Their life and art intertwined, especially whilst raising their family in the 1950s and 60s. In the early days of parenting, after they put the children to bed, they would paint in their home studio.

Claudia's dark use of sienna, ochre, umber and blue greys, which were characteristic of her early palette of colours, convey how small the studio was, as well as the fact that the both of them would paint late at night. Newspapers would often depict Claudia as an 'artist-mother' or create headlines such as 'after the children are put to bed'.

The coastline was also an important presence in Claudia's work, and she would often depict families relaxing and playing on the beach as in the piece Collecting Shells (1981). In the flow of seaside fun, a child is showing his mother a shell and we also see others searching near the water. Collecting shells, an activity Claudia inherited as a child from her parents, is a consistent narrative in her work. In this piece, as in Self Portrait with Gwilym, we see the use of sienna, ochre, umber and grey blues, but the painting is lighter and conveys the expanse of the open air.

This palette of colours is emulated in the piece Bedsitter II with Coat Hangers, painted in the same year. There is a meditative feel as the young girls relax on the bed. Harry Heuser shares in his Art UK article on Claudia Williams that the girls in the painting are based on her fellow pupils at Chelsea School of Art 30 years earlier. In this painting, the girls are about to leave home for the first time, and the clothes hangers are evident objects that convey the tension between the bedroom and the outside world.

Through her use of colour and composition, we see Claudia proving that the landscape of the home is as important as the landscapes of nature, but despite this, all of these landscapes are backdrops to the figures that they sustain. Claudia's paintings were full of significance beyond the beaches and rooms of the home, and she used her figures to personify motherhood and to express abstract concepts – like the fleeting nature of youth suggested in this painting.

Brenda Chamberlain was an artist and author that Claudia Williams greatly admired, and they met when Claudia travelled over to Bardsey Island (Ynys Enlli) in her teenage years. As far as we know, Brenda never experienced motherhood and so didn't face the exact same restrictions as a female artist. Brenda lived on Bardsey from 1947 to 1962 and it is interesting to note that it was her mother, Elsie Chamberlain, who gave her the confidence to succeed in a world that was, at that time, much more restrictive for women.

Jill Piercy noted that Elsie Chamberlain was a woman who had quite a bit of influence in the Bangor area, and she was supportive of her daughter's interest in art as she herself was very fond of drawing and embroidering. At six years old, Brenda decided that she would follow a career as an artist and author.

Kyffin Williams (1918–2006) was of the opinion that Brenda was an 'artist of unusual talent who allowed us to glimpse into a world of aesthetic purity'. We get a glimpse of this in the work she produced living on Bardsey Island. Brenda's perspective changed from the macro to the micro, and despite portraying Bardsey Island and its people in many of her paintings, she looked at the surrounding landscape through the microscope of her creativity and figuratively saw parts of the human body everywhere.

Jane Roberts, one of the island residents, said that 'she would take us down to the beach and show us the head of a woman in the rock'. Brenda was greatly interested in rocks and considered them a framework to the earth.

Brenda used the language of the body to describe this earthly framework, like in the piece Grey Breast (1962). The grey rock is referred to as a human breast, and in the painting itself we see angular shapes and textures that almost imitate the breastbone and ribs.

Rockhead Red (1962) has a more bloody and reddish feel and was painted in the same year. In this painting, there is an abstract stone that could be interpreted as an artery or tissue in the body. Brenda considered the things that she discovered and saw through her writing and art, and we get to experience her way of thinking in her novel Tide-Race (1962).

'Some of these rock-veins were thin as spider web, others were thick as human arteries. The stone would seem to be composed of petrified tissues, skin, muscle, delicate bones [...]' she shared. She described the sea as a muscular entity, often referencing its different temperaments.

In these abstract paintings from 1962, Brenda portrays Bardsey as a human entity. We could argue that Brenda's body itself guided how she saw the outer landscape surrounding her, as well as the claim that twenty thousand saints have been buried on the island. Despite having lived near the sea for almost fifteen years, Brenda was scared of drowning; but this fear didn't hinder her curiosity of the way a drowned body could transform (imaginatively) into a rock 'shaped and sculpted by the action of the sea and the pull of the tides'. In a way, we could argue that Brenda's inner landscape transformed in the same way as she experienced the island and its elements.

I sense that the landscape and isolation of Bardsey greatly affected the mind and work of Brenda Chamberlain, and there was a natural symbiosis between the metamorphosis of the landscape and metamorphosis of self. The landscape of her home on Bardsey was also a canvas for her, and in 2022 I had the privilege of visiting her old home on the island, 'Carreg Fawr' (Large Rock) where her murals can still be seen on the walls today.

I stayed on Bardsey for the first time in 2018, and my first stay left a significant impression on me, like the way I connect to the landscape and creatures around me, and my relationship with silence (which is never truly silent). My first experience on Bardsey Island was significant and beneficial to me as I faced the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was worthwhile to be able to return in 2022 after experiencing isolated life on the mainland.

Through committing to their lives as artists, and metamorphosing with their life and craft, we could argue that Claudia Williams and Brenda Chamberlain both nurtured and cared for their inner landscapes, and that it was this that enabled them to evolve. Contrary to Brenda Chamberlain, who had a symbiotic relationship with the landscape, Claudia Williams' feat, in my opinion, was to push beyond her boundaries and to carve out an artistic landscape for herself, and in the process of doing so, metamorphosing as a mother and artist and creating a successful career for herself.

Without a doubt, both of them succeeded in challenging what was possible for women to accomplish within their time through expanding their landscapes, and creating new horizons, for female artists in Wales and beyond.

Bethany Celyn, writer, poet and singer-songwriter

This content was supported by Welsh Government funding

Written originally in Welsh and translated into English by the author

Further reading

Brenda Chamberlain, Tide-Race, Seren Classics, 2019

Owain Evans, 'Artist of 'joyous, optimistic' work dies at 90', BBC News, June 2024

Harry Heuser, '"People are always interesting wherever they are": My Tribute to Claudia Williams for the London Times', Harry Heuser blog, July 2024

Kate Holman, Brenda Chamberlain, Univeristy of Wales Press, 1997

Robert Meyrick, Claudia Williams, National Library of Wales, 2002

Robert Meyrick & Harry Heuser, Claudia Williams: An Intimate Acquaintance, Sansom & Co., 2013

Jill Piercy, Brenda Chamberlain: Artist & Writer, Parthian Books, 2013