From
Field Notes for a Native Land: The Significance of Custodial Aesthetics for Welsh Art
by Iwan Bala in Planet 135:

In The Politics of Modernism, Raymond Williams criticised the hermetic nature of late modernism, calling for a counter modernism which would be more accessible to the wider community. Perhaps custodial aesthetics, which is directed more to the specifics of particular cultures, in some way addresses his concerns. The alternative modernism of Latin America where artists have dealt with issues arising from their own cultural situation, as opposed to adopting a stylistic internationalism with its avowed allegiance to form above content could be said to be of a similar order.

Artist Fiona Foley, an indigenous Australian, has described her work as being involved with the custodianship of her people's memory - in her case a people dispossessed of their land. Similar aesthetics are at work in other parts of the world, in the Basque country, Ireland, in Zimbabwe, India and Cuba. Recent changes brought about by post-colonial theory and the critique of modernism in the art world and elsewhere, mean that we are beginning to see more of such work. As David Alston, former Keeper of Art at the National Museums and Galleries of Wales said in the foreword to Welsh Painters Talking :

"Our present time is facing up to a more fragmentary sense of artistic activities and where they fit in. Idiosyncrasy, locality, individuality are reasserting themselves in the face of the homogenisation of cultures as a whole."

This is the concern of many artists (myself included) working in a variety of media in Wales, about whom very little has been written outside of exhibition catalogues. Indeed very little has been written about contemporary art in Wales full stop. My aim with this book is therefore to elicit a response and perhaps create a dialogue within the essays of the book itself, a dialogue which can be enlarged upon by its readers. Custodial Aesthetics in this sense is neither a prescription nor a manifesto, and I don't suggest that, as an aesthetic, it is one that is necessarily consciously selected - it finds the artist rather than vice versa. Thus work tends to be produced by an artist which points towards this aesthetic, rather than the individual artist choosing to be a custodial aesthetician or remembrancer. The term simply gives a name to the idea, the understanding that society has a way of producing artists with the necessary imagination and cultural consciousness to address issues that are to do with identity and its complex and ambiguous nature. The artists I am interested in deal with issues of Welsh identity and the notion of continuing that identity by making it visible in all its guises...