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Mia Gwenllian (b.2001) is a Welsh experimental artist based in Shrewsbury.
Her work explores the transformation of memory and inherited history into material, metaphysical, and spiritual experience through artistic preservation and archival practice. Employing her background in fine art and traditional photography, Gwenllian considers material, technical, curatorial care to assemble images and sculptures that mirror the tactility of past-time and past-life.
Mia Gwenllian has exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy New Contemporaries 2025, where she became the recipient of the Fleming-Wyfold 2025 Art Foundation Award. Gwenllian recently participated in a group exhibition at Oriel Sploj in Machynlleth, Wales to question the extent of institutional support for graduate artists hoping to return to Wales.
She holds a Bachelor Honour in Fine Art Photography from Glasgow School of Art and is currently working on a series of geometric drawings on aged maps; towards a group exhibition ‘Shared Experience’ at The Alchemy Experiment in June 2026; and a curatorial anthology ‘Collections of Collections’.
Her work explores the transformation of memory and inherited history into material, metaphysical, and spiritual experience through artistic preservation and archival practice. Employing her background in fine art and traditional photography, Gwenllian considers material, technical, curatorial care to assemble images and sculptures that mirror the tactility of past-time and past-life.
Mia Gwenllian has exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy New Contemporaries 2025, where she became the recipient of the Fleming-Wyfold 2025 Art Foundation Award. Gwenllian recently participated in a group exhibition at Oriel Sploj in Machynlleth, Wales to question the extent of institutional support for graduate artists hoping to return to Wales.
She holds a Bachelor Honour in Fine Art Photography from Glasgow School of Art and is currently working on a series of geometric drawings on aged maps; towards a group exhibition ‘Shared Experience’ at The Alchemy Experiment in June 2026; and a curatorial anthology ‘Collections of Collections’.
My creative practice is an esoteric exploration of personal and external archives and theories that guide a re-interpretation of historical and spiritual identity. I attempt to find complex truths in objects, images, and shapes, and document how I physically mend, preserve, disrupt them through digital scanning, analogue photography, sculpture, and hand-stitching. I often find that language, translation, and the hand-written text is key element, and I am drawn to the idea of unknowing, concealment, and secrets. I have previously utilised Cymraeg in areas of my work towards an English-speaking audience as a way of deliberately masking poetic meaning, thus putting the historical, social, political impact of the language as the crucial context.
I am interested in how memory and consciousness trasmit a spirit - from my collection of tainted photo-objects, maps, paper, ephemera - through to states of recovery, deep meditation, healing, and habitual psychic patterns and behaviours. For me, collecting objects has been a ritualisation of inner isolation, forming new meaning and expansion. It is important that the objects I use in my work remain nondescript and non-cliché, according to the common ‘found object’.
I assemble objects into still life displays and photograph them, amending and capturing their ephemerality as a delicate act of preservation. I develop my photographs into salt prints, kallitypes, and toned cyanotypes, to remark on the features of indexicality, and the idea that the photographic print becomes a relic, or artefact of history. I believe the existence between dimensions - surreal or intentional - is significant, and I hope to communicate this feeling of ambivalence through tone, presentation, and curation of work.
My recent creative motivations stem from recovering from an eating disorder and finding new ways to navigate life. I have become fascinated by cosmology; especially how planetary transits and celestial movement can mirror human emotion and experience. Through circular motions, angles, and intersecting lines, I am discovering themes of blockage, healing, and transmutation. I am creating antique map collages using stitched panel, drawings, and geometric forms to embody transformation, Ego death, self-acceptance, and the process of clearing space for renewal.
I am interested in how memory and consciousness trasmit a spirit - from my collection of tainted photo-objects, maps, paper, ephemera - through to states of recovery, deep meditation, healing, and habitual psychic patterns and behaviours. For me, collecting objects has been a ritualisation of inner isolation, forming new meaning and expansion. It is important that the objects I use in my work remain nondescript and non-cliché, according to the common ‘found object’.
I assemble objects into still life displays and photograph them, amending and capturing their ephemerality as a delicate act of preservation. I develop my photographs into salt prints, kallitypes, and toned cyanotypes, to remark on the features of indexicality, and the idea that the photographic print becomes a relic, or artefact of history. I believe the existence between dimensions - surreal or intentional - is significant, and I hope to communicate this feeling of ambivalence through tone, presentation, and curation of work.
My recent creative motivations stem from recovering from an eating disorder and finding new ways to navigate life. I have become fascinated by cosmology; especially how planetary transits and celestial movement can mirror human emotion and experience. Through circular motions, angles, and intersecting lines, I am discovering themes of blockage, healing, and transmutation. I am creating antique map collages using stitched panel, drawings, and geometric forms to embody transformation, Ego death, self-acceptance, and the process of clearing space for renewal.