'Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation.
Deep space is my dwelling place,
The stars my destination.'

Gully Foyle is a 1961 painting by Robyn Denny in the collection of National Museum Cardiff. An unusual title for a giant abstract painting – a two-metre doorway with vertical gradients of colour at its threshold. The name refers to the central character in Alfred Bester's influential work of science fiction The Stars My Destination, published in 1956.

Bester, an American writer hiring a house in Surrey, pilfered names from a phone book when planning the novel: Sheffield, Yeovil, Dagenham, Presteigne. The last is a town in Powys, Wales, now home to The Spaceguard Centre, 'the only organisation in the UK dedicated to addressing the hazard of Near Earth Objects.'

The character Gully Foyle is a force of nature – the plot is driven by a series of dramatic character changes. After being marooned in space by industrial magnate Presteigne, Foyle transitions from near illiterate drifter in a revenge-fuelled journey that sees him become a prisoner, inventor, dandy and prophet.

Denny's painting is an entrance into many strips of colour – not so much a progression as a reflection of continuous change. Both character and painting can be conceived as portals. They suggest to me a new way to experience the hybrid terrain of industry, land, infrastructure and architecture of south Wales, through a fusion of science fiction and art.

I'm driving fast on the highroads of the south Wales valleys, looking down on factories and fields of corrugated metal packed beside eggshell, white and sand-coloured walls, brown pitched roofs and supermarkets. Hills overtake it all: deforested tops, grass now growing around communication pylons and stone trig points. The landscape is one of fusion, energy and constant change.

Ernest Zobole's paintings capture a similar sense of moving through an alien landscape. In Valley at Night with Figures and Lights, towns and people bend around a near formless nature. Structures that could be industrial towers and floodlights take on the appearance of a UFO arrival, the world distorted by differing perceptions of time and meaning.

In From Flat 11, Zobole focuses more intently on the built environment, capturing the particularities of a hypnotic yellow light that fills valley towns at night. Hills and factories are hidden, lit only by pockets of overspilling lamplight, the infrastructure of streets, bridges and train lines taking on a stark, sharp presence.

Looking from above, From Flat 11 again uses a distorted plane, invoking the earth's curvature, which affects both town and apartment. As art historian Ceri Thomas has described, Zobole's landscapes often warp around a 'figure-in-the-door…a defining leitmotif in [his] late paintings' or an 'isolated figure/watcher in a portal', often connected to an interior space. It recalls the writing of interiors in the science fiction of Samuel R. Delany, Ursula Le Guin or Phillip K. Dick: a home or building becoming a way into the experience of an altered society.

In these paintings, and likewise in Zobole's House and Exterior, there is always an intense sense of movement, approaching disorientation: the 'bewilderment', in the way Jack Halberstam uses the term, of 'being lost in space and time.'

This sense of the architecture becoming alien was taken up extensively in the novels of J. G. Ballard. In his books, characters drawn by unconscious urges and desires rediscover a near-primal connection to the architecture and city planning of post-war Britain. Dr Robert Vaughan's perverse attraction to highways in Crash, starting with his car accident near London City Airport, leads him, like Robert Maitland in Concrete Island, to the places between, beyond and around networks of infrastructure: multi-storey car parks, underpasses, airports and motorway verges.

Richard C. Cox's series 'Cardiff Airport Suite' instils this sense of a landscape that approaches the inhuman yet is familiar, hypnotic: sites for temporary encounters, places of movement and transfer. Travelling past the fields and hedgerows that surround Cardiff airport, these paintings echo the eerie, absent space affected by the compound's psychic overspill. They ask what state change is needed in order for human habitation?

Walking beside Celsa steelworks along the verge of Rover Way, Cardiff, I take photographs as I circumvent the factories. Huge washed-out warehouses, overgrown rail tracks, wildflowers, mounds of scrap metal. Energy is whipped up by being out of place, with cars slowing, travellers punching their horns, looking up at the girders and ducts, searching the strips of vacant land approaching the sea. These coalescences of industry, land and logistics generate their own forms of more-than-human life.

Kay Keogh's 'The Control Room' polyptych includes multiple views of human and built environments. Many of the paintings have an unusual angle onto their subjects: raised high up, not high enough for a 'god's eye view', but too high to suggest something similar to Zobole's apartment outlook.

The uneasy way they look down on isolated human figures – the surrounding environment reduced to subtle demarcations and zoning – recalls the austere sensation of a cooling tower, those near-living concrete masses, where steam is vacated high above the works. Industrial areas are living, inhabited places, both in the sense of their position – often sandwiched within or spilling across towns – but also in and of themselves: living, non-human entities.

In the many permutations of cohabitation between industry, housing and landscape in south Wales, utopian architecture and planning sometimes go unnoticed. The post-war New Towns, the only Welsh example being Cwmbran, were schemes for the fusion of industrial workers' housing and nature. They were influenced by Ebenezer Howard's idea of the 'garden city' (of which Rhiwbina on the outskirts of Cardiff is an example), 'third places' that would form a hybrid of city, town and country, with roots returning to Wales in the worker's cities of Robert Owen.

Experiencing these modernist projects with concrete walkways and Le Corbusier-inspired tower blocks, sparks what Owen Hatherley describes as 'a common contemporary phenomena of nostalgia for the future', a memory of radical housing projects, their visions of an alternate future, and the possibilities of visionary architecture rearranging a capitalist approach to time, living and work.

In The Stars My Destination, Gully Foyle's narrative of change and transformation breaks apart and restructures time. He experiences time loops, fragmentation, non-causal moments, time travel, teleportation and ghostly visions. A synaesthetic character in constant movement, he is one relevant to artists who sense the many temporal layers in landscapes of constant change.

Beau W. Beakhouse, artist and writer

This content was supported by Welsh Government funding

Further reading

Alfred Bester, 'My Affair with Science Fiction', Library of America

John Grindrod, Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain, Old Street Publishing, 2013

Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire, Duke University Press, 2020

Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism, John Hunt Publishing, 2008

Ceri Thomas, 'Ernest Zobole, Painter: Out of and into the Blue' in Christine Kinsey and Ceridwen Lloyd Morgan (eds), Imaging the Imagination, Gomer Press, 2005