Words

These three drawings were for a very special project, a local guidebook celebrating the magnificent crags around the Llanberis area. 
It was a pleasure to be a part of this and I can't wait to see the guidebook printed in all its glory. The originals are on display in Ynys Ettw.

It was so great to be a part of 2023 Arcteryx Climbing Academy in Langdale. Lots of lovely people and fun things going on! Thanks so much to Arcteryx for inviting me along to do a live drawing and run a couple of drawing workshops, it was an absolute pleasure.

* photo Charlotte Bull photography

Throughout my MFA I looked to explore feelings of being on the verge of an intensely personal transition, the journey to becoming a mother. Unpicking the question of what it means to become a parent, an archetypal change that requires stepping into the unknown and entering into a different kind of relationship to the world.

As individual experience and potential for experience within this transition to parenthood is vast, the key idea that I found held the most draw for me was the concept of 'liminality'. Liminality is an inbetween state, as coined by Arnold Van Gennep in his early research into rites of passage, where the liminal represents the threshold between what was, and what is yet to come. Considering this idea within my research opened up a new question of how to reside within this liminal space and what it means to confront the unknown with its potential for both growth and destruction.

I began draw inspiration from doorways and entrances which symbolised this idea of leaving one space and entering into a new place. Of course, being that I tend to visit a lot of places with rocks, caves began to feature heavily.

"In anthropology, liminality is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete."

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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.

Fantastic few days of panels, lectures, performances and chatting about mountains at the Performing Mountains Symposium.

I was invited to sit on a panel focusing on Everest and it's translations. Each of the panel were invited to bring an artifact to discuss, mine was my portrait of Sir Chris Bonington that I created at Banff Centre Mountain Film Festival at the end of last year. In the creation of the portrait myself and Claire Carter interviewed Chris about his experiences on Everest, which I then translated visually into his portrait. This project was an interesting shift from my previous work that has been more focused on direct experience of the landscape, with these portraits I wanted to encapsulate the lasting impressions that these direct experiences can have on the individual.

SO excited to announce that I'll be doing a residency at this years Banff Mountain Film Festival! My project is a progression on this piece I did of Ben, it's about how our experience in the landscape can help shape us as people.

For more info, see the website...

My project is called 'The Land that Shaped Us'
Really looking forward to seeing Sarah Uhl and her love letters to the land too 😊

Thanks very much to Jo and Lana for their support in applying for the Fleck Fellowship Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity

WATCH FULL FILM HERE

A wee film of the live art piece I was working on at Kendal Mountain Festival this year.

Thanks everyone who contributed a pledge, from the large to the small, you all demonstrated a good scope of human endeavour.
Would love to see photos of people achieving their pledges.. send them this way if you have any!!

You can buy a limited edition print of the finished piece on my website here…
http://www.tessalyons.co.uk/single_image/make-winter-count

Thanks Lowe Alpine Finalcrux Films BMC

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A few reflections on 2016, my foray into full time art…

Read it here.

The British Mountaineer Council sent me a three other creatives off to a bothy in the Scottish mountains to create stuff and make a film about it. The film is called 'The Bothy Project' and will be available on BMC TV soon.