My essentials: Pietru Farrugia’s cultural picks

About

I am a psychotherapist and an artist working mainly in drawing. I am interested in dreams, memory, old stones, faces, weather, and the strange little objects people keep around them.

My drawings are often records of night-time. Dreams, almost-dreams, and the things that arrive when ordinary explanations have gone quiet. I am drawn to work that feels direct, private, and not too polished, work that keeps something back. My therapeutic work and my drawings both depend on attention to what is half-said, partly hidden, or easily missed.

Book or online story

A recent story that stayed with me was about rewilding through ponds. Not wolves, bears, or enormous landscapes, but ponds. Small, muddy places where life begins to return. I liked the scale of it. Restoration, in that version, is less a grand gesture than a matter of making room for frogs. That feels close to drawing. A contained space where something may slowly reappear.

Film

The last film I saw at the cinema was Project Hail Mary, though the dark room and popcorn were also a large part of the appeal. I like going to the cinema because it asks you to sit still and look. That is not so far from therapy, or from drawing. You give something your attention and then see what remains afterwards, and often the frame does as much work as the plot.

Internet and TV

Online, I often return to Darren Spratt’s WC21 Productions. He makes films about old British places. Lanes, ruins, churches, bridges, earthworks, and overlooked corners of the map. I like the patience of them. They are curious, muddy, and not over-produced. It is antiquarian YouTube in the best sense. Someone stopping to look where most people would keep walking.

Music

I listen to various things, but Dead Can Dance are a familiar presence. I like the voices, drones, percussion, and the sense of age in the sound. Their music has space and weight without becoming heavy-handed. It suits working late, especially when something is unclear.

Place

Wales is the place I most want to return to, especially North Wales. I am drawn to St Winefride’s Well in Holywell, and to wells, springs, Roman baths, and other places where water, stone and ordinary use have gathered over time. I like sites that still feel active rather than neatly explained. Places people have visited for healing, ritual, habit, curiosity, or no very clear reason at all, and that’s close to what I look for in drawings too. Not spectacle, but a record of what remains.