One of Megan (Margaret) Watts Hughes voice paintings on an A4 size glass plate I photographed on the light box. With thanks to Carfarthfa Castle Museum and Art Gallery.

A treasure hunt to see the works of a relatively obscure artist led me on a trip to Merthyr Tydfil in Wales. Before I arrived in the UK, I read a book about unrecognised women artists and there was a reference to a Welsh singer, Megan (Margaret) Watts Hughes (1842-1907) who ‘sang’ pictures onto glass plates.

I looked up more about her and found a few articles online, including a reference to where a definitive collection of her works is housed, in Cyfarthfa Castle Museum and Art Gallery in Merthyr Tydfil. I emailed the gallery and asked about her work and arranged to go there and see them. It was a private viewing as the works are so fragile they are not on public display.

Much of the collection had been donated to the museum many years ago by her brother and kept in storage in several boxes, but never accessioned into the museum and art gallery collection. Suddenly people ‘discovered’ her and asked to see her amazing artworks . The boxes were hunted out and art works catalogued, however they have never been in a major exhibition.

Here was a treasure worth seeking. My husband and I were led into one of the gallery rooms where a light box was placed next to paper wrapped packages in numerous sizes laid out on the table ready to be unwrapped to view.

One by one the glass plates were brought out carefully by Michelle from the gallery staff and placed on the light box to reveal their depths of colour. We oohed and ahhed with each new glass plate, amazed at the variety of vibrational patterns the artist had created by singing into her home made vibrational sound box, she named an eidophone.

Since reading that first article and arranging my visit to Wales at the beginning of this year, there have been many more articles published about her and so many enquiries that the gallery are now stopping viewings to preserve the works. I was the second last of the private viewings booked in. Talk about luck!

Megan (Margaret is her Anglicised name) was born in Dowlais a small town in the mining heart of Merthyr Tydfil in southern Wales. She became such a successful vocalist that the townsfolk took up a collection to send her to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Her singing experiments later led her to devise her ‘eidophone’ to measure the vibrational strength of her voice. She noticed that small seeds started to vibrate and form geometric patterns and so her quest to make ‘voice figures’ began.

Some of the glass plates were A4 size, some were small experiments which she labelled with the octave and musical interval. Most were single or two colours and the blended ‘feathering’ made by modulations in her voice demonstrated her skill and voice control.

While German physicist Ernst Chladni (1756-1827) had earlier experimented with sand vibrations, Watts Hughes was the first to use coloured fluids as paint to create voice figures. Her experiments predate the cymatics work of Hans Jenny (1904-1977) and other contemporary sound artists.

Watts Hughes published an article in 1891 and was the first woman to present her invention and findings to the Royal Society of London. In her book The Eidophone Voice Figures — Geometrical and Natural Forms Produced by Vibrations of the Human Voice (1904) she gives detailed descriptions of her process and experimentation. You can see more images and a diagram of her eidophone as a video here.

A deeply religious woman, she believed that her paintings revealed “yet another link in the great chain of the organised universe that, we are told in Holy Writ, took its shape in the voice of God.”[1]

There are plans to hold an exhibition of her works in Swansea, but I do hope to one day see that they are exhibited somewhere that gives them the international attention they so deserve, like in London, New York or even Australia!