These items represent the work of artist Catrin Menai, who was awarded the TI.M.E (Tlysau Mynydd Eryri) residency project, based in Eryri with Plantlife. The project sought to highlight alpine species as enigmatic treasures and to explore the relationship between the mountains, their species, and the diverse communities that live within them or in sight of them.

Focusing in particular on the Snowdon Rainbow Beetle, Catrin explored different forms of collaboration and translation, experimenting with how knowledge might be shared with and through the community. Through the beetle, we are invited to see knowledge not as fixed, but as refracted, bent and reshaped by each new perspective. Gradually, through her practice, the voices of the community begin to form an ecosystem- a mountain of shared thought. Here we are invited to consider how far a thought can travel, and what shifts when knowledge passes from one person to another- across bodies and across landscapes.

About: Catrin Menai is a multidisciplinary artist from Bethesda, North Wales, whose practice is rooted in collaboration, often working alongside ecologists and practitioners from other fields. She creates narrative-driven works that explore the communicative potential of everyday objects, gestures, and places- assembling poetic fragments, correspondences, and archival material into a call and response between languages, eras, and geographies.

This work was commissioned as part of the Natur Am Byth! project by Cyfoeth Naturiol Cymru.