Gweni Llwyd
About Gweni
Gweni Llwyd’s practice reflects on complexities of everyday life across tactile and digital realms highlighting living as being part of a messy shared metabolism.
Gweni Llwyd’s practice reflects on expansive complexities of everyday life across tactile and digital realms – taking cues from things including but not limited to: TV shows, microbes, music videos, megalithic sites, small talk, and accidentally stepping on snails. Throughout her work there is a playful weaving of personal, collective and more-than-human experiences, highlighting living as being part of a messy shared metabolism, where nature and technology spill onto each other. She mainly works in installation, moving image, sound, drawing, game engines and sculpture – to blur distinctions of what exists now and elsewhere in time and space and to play with notions of fact and fiction, past, present and future.
Gweni Llwyd is the current Elan Links artist in residence (September – November 2023). She will spend a total of one month in the Elan Valley and one month at Heatherwick Studios at Aberystwyth Arts Centre.
So far during the Elan Valley strand of the residency Gweni has been immersed in the land and developing her research – undertaking daily rituals such as drawing, writing, sound recording, walking, running, stargazing, observing weather and season changes and bird feeding – investigating the valley as an expansive living organism composed of many smaller organisms that span different scales of time.
Inspired by encountering obscured objects and infrastructures throughout the Elan estate that bridge time, place and human stories, Gweni will host a Time Travelling Sculptures workshop at CARAD inviting attendees to craft objects using clay that they’d want people in the future to discover.
While in Aberystwyth, Gweni has been reflecting on the time spent in the Elan Valley and working in the studio in experimental and playful ways. Observing the rain clouds blowing in over Cardigan Bay towards mid-Wales and research into global movement of water has prompted writings and drawings. Gweni hopes to host an open studio day towards the end of her residency to share her experiences from the residency and works in progress at Unit 1, Heatherwick Studios, Aberystwyth.