Never, Ever, Ever | SonicIlliteracy

This is my artist statement

Never, ever, ever, ever, have I felt I didn't fit

Never, ever, ever, ever in my long life (22 years) have I once thought “I don’t fit in”. For the most part, I have always made easy friends, felt a respected member of peer groups and tried to be kind. Currently as a visual artist all of my work seems to be a reaction to my natural defensiveness and love for my country. How boring is it getting. It’s not that it’s getting boring to me, but at what point am I going to move on or are people going to listen. I cannot change anyone and frankly after retrospection I have realised that there are far too many to change, and that the problem is systematic and deep-rooted.

From the start, if you will. I was born and grew up in Merthyr Tydfil. I have a very large family all situated in the South Wales valleys and I have always, (although not been emotionally available) spent many days of many weeks of my many years with my family members.

Merthyr Tydfil has an extensive history of industrial power, business accolades, voices of music and voices of politics. MT is often considered one of the most deprived areas in Wales and despite our fall from grace, once being held as the ‘iron capital of the world’, it is is seeing improvements economically due to tourist attractions and our rural national parks close by. Anyway. Why Merthyr.

I grew up in a ‘well-off’ household geographically speaking, with my Mother a hair dresser in the town centre and my Father an electrical engineer in Cardiff and England. I went through primary school and played football etc. in town. Then, coming to year 6 I had the opportunity to attend an exam for a school half an hour away into the mountains. I, unknowingly/obliviously excelled and was awarded a partial scholarship for the school. Throughout my formative primary school years I had for the most part only two-three close friends and didn’t share too many interests with a lot of the other boys or girls at school. I was generally very oblivious and sort of floated through everything in my own world. I would never have described it as self indulgence however, as I was always outwardly interested but arduously introspective. A teacher one year told my parents that I live in Aran’s World, which fittingly became my instagram username for a year. This led to an unlabelled and until my later years an unnoticed sense of difference to people and although I was always too ‘manly’, too ‘serious’ or too ‘grown up’ to have even battered an eyelid at the notion of any nerves or, honestly, any negative or ‘weak’ emotion, I actually was always very clouded by my difference. Year 6 came along and after my two friends let school I was left with one thing, to play football to ‘fit in’ with the remaining boys at School. At first I had two left feet and I was obviously at no level to compete. Competition is my blood though, and after a full summer of obsession, afternoon to night playing football on my own, I actually turned out fairly talented. Regardless of this, I was still the intruder on the fringe of normal Merthyr kids.

I’m sure that football’s place in mine and my peer’s life and our respective self-value will become its own writing at some point; so in an attempt to keep this short we move on to high school. At said school, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I had fun everyday, made good friends and once again obliviously floated through the first few years. There we very often hints of problems in those early years, which I valiantly contested. During year 7 and 8, I wouldn’t have enough fingers on my hands for examples of other 12-14 year olds ‘joking’ about where I came from. An interesting dichotomy was etching itself into my friendship graph. My friends from home were slowly declining, their image of me shifting and their assumption of my views changing due to the school I had attended, and the school friends slowly increasing but, so much so that I ended up stuck in between both lines, not tall enough to reach one line, but too far away to reach out to my past friends. How can I verbalise this feeling? I strongly believe that nothing in me ever changed studying elsewhere from Merthyr, but it must have as I have ended up where I am now. I always held a respect and love for my friends from home, but my sense of difference only inflated when I saw them less. It seemed that I had moved on and forgot, when in actual fact I had moved on and constantly toiled over. I very, very much just wanted to belong and be like my friends.

So, how it shifted in school then. I also believe that the opinions of these kids around me, about how ‘dodgy’, ‘thieving’ or lower I was for living only 20 miles down the road in Merthyr, were surely not their own opinions. I do not believe that these kids, who had no experience of Merthyr or growing up in any shape or form a similar way to myself and my friends, had the imagination to strike up such discriminatory opinions. Class and locational diversion became black and white and It become increasingly clear that we were identified for our backgrounds before our accomplishments. By sixth form, it was abundantly clear. I would rather not speak publicly or bring up anything that needn’t be, but I would like to highlight the effect of systematic and familial opinions about class and people on children. My defensiveness over Merthyr was quite commonly known around the school and it still boils my blood to think about some of the comments I heard. An 11 year old girl nervous for her first day in new school should never have to feel that certain members of the class would not sit by her incase ‘she robbed them’. Awful. An 11 year old boy should never be humiliated for his ‘lack of sophisticated dialect’ or looked upon with disgust for simply saying ‘by er’ rather than ‘by there’. Accents should not be used as a parameter of intelligence. It is never funny to say that you are ‘lucky to have gone to the valley and come back in one piece’. Do people have any empathy for others? Do people know the complexity of other peoples lives? Do people know that without Merthyr Wales would be a completely different country? I feel ashamed to listen to the opinions of those who declare superiority or higher importance over any other person due to the cards that they have been dealt. How disgusting to look down upon a passerby saying ‘good afternoon’ to you.

(Walter Waygood 2024)

Quickly I will bring us to present day. A couple of years on working in the fashion industry and plenty of time to retroactively delve into these experiences, I have realised that the reason for my obsession with Wales comes down to this initial pride and defence of Merthyr. My ideas have inflated onto a national scale, and my work has been a way of calling for an end to this superiority complex. I am not by any means a nationalist, In its common terms, but I am by all means someone who will defend my country and home town full-chest. I spent far too many years not being good enough for those at school and just too far from those at home. I have also spent far too many years desperate to belong to either group that quite frankly, I don’t belong to. Finally, I have spent too long defending my background to speculators, am I too this? Am I too that? I am a product of Merthyr Tydfil and my family, and that is all it is. Cymru Am Byth and Yma O Hyd. For those who don’t know, this means Wales forever and we are still here. Despite everything, we are still here. Despite the discrimination, we will still be here as a community that I will always be part of.