Catrin Menai was awarded the TI.M.E (Tlysau Mynydd Eryri) residency project based in Eryri with Plantlife.
This residency aimed 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.
Catrin’s work beautifully brought together the diverse communities living within sight of the Eryri mountains- people of all ages and abilities- to enable access and understanding of this vital upland biodiversity.
There Are Some Beetles (2025) is a process-led film that traces a series of correspondences—with a mountain, with those who live in its orbit, and with the rare alpine plants and invertebrates that teeter on the edge of visibility, under threat of extinction.
Together, these fragments come together to form a sense of wholeness, a sense of time; assembled from loose, interconnected parts. During her residency with The Mountain Jewel Project in Eryri, Catrin explored different forms of translation—experimenting with how knowledge might be shared with and through the community.
As part of this process, she collaborated with the botanist Robbie Blackhall-Miles, alongside several other creative practitioners. The artist Sarah Boulton reimagined moments and overheard fragments from the mountains and communities Catrin engaged with—capturing traces of place and voice. These impressions were then distilled into a series of poetic sentences, that were in turn translated by Esyllt Angharad Lewis, and passed on to the dancer Misa Brzezicki, who performed them back into the glacial cirque of Cwm Idwal during winter time.
Gwen Sion composed an accompanying soundtrack, layering the voices Catrin had gathered around Yr Wyddfa, in collaboration with Lowri Hedd of Gwyrddni. Within this film work the voices of the community begin to form an ecosystem—a mountain of shared thought. How far can a thought travel? What shifts when knowledge is passed from one person to another, across bodies, across landscapes? The Snowdon Rainbow Beetle traps and redirects wavelengths of light, appearing different from different angles- refusing fixity in our eye.
Thinking through the beetle, we are invited to consider knowledge not as fixed, but as refracted—bent and reshaped by each new perspective.