“The land on which Los Gázquez (Joya: AiR) sits captures the place for me. Its ashen-grey clay is impervious to rain so, when the thunderstorms come, water sluices off it, leaving imprints there like aqueous fossils. Between the rivulet echoes were my footprints. Many of them.

During my residency, I covered 223km of tracks and trails; first to escape, and then to explore. I drew satisfaction from creating those shoe-shaped marks and accepting that they would be smoothed invisible again.

When the sun comes it transforms the earth. Baking under its intensity, new marks emerge: fissures which imitate the pathways traversing the mountains.

Hours of running through this landscape have clarified my thoughts and crystallised my ideas. This land has become the foundation bolstering my existing work, and the fertile soil of fresh inspiration”.

Bronwen Jones

Bronwen Jones is writing her first novel, Murmurations, which is set in rural England and Spain in the present day. It follows the journey of two adult siblings in the year following their father’s suicide. The protagonists have a distant, fractious relationship, but are forced to co-operate when they encounter their father’s plan to draw them together and to uncover murky truths of the past. Since her residency at Joya: AiR, Bronwen has been developing a new piece of writing, Querencia, which is told in 14 episodes, each focusing on one of 14 characters over the period of a fortnight. It considers what happens when a place of supposed security and strength becomes defined instead by a lack or loss of its essential components.