Fine Art Photography School of Fine Art
Mia Gwenllian
Mia Gwenllian (b.2001, Aberystwyth) is an artist and writer currently based in London. In 2024, she graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Photography from The Glasgow School of Art.
Mia is interested in the possibilities of sculpture and how it can be utilised to bridge the refinements of photography, found objects, and poetry. Her attraction to the primitive details of objects related to traditional Welsh craftmanship and folk art reveal the significance of iconography, where inherited symbolisation becomes a key element in her creative interpretation. She draws upon personal receptivity of grief when investigating the shared fragility of memory and identity, challenging her embodied self as an unforeseen performative initiator of forgotten ancestry and as revenants of a past life, collecting and implementing Welsh archived imagery and ancient text to object the conventions of authorial autonomy and ownership.
Mia’s practice scopes a continuum of ephemeral experimentation that often references the foundations of philosophical phenomenology, where the enmeshment of lived experience becomes the primary source of influence. She conceives her intense relationship with inheritance into formats of traditional photographic printing techniques, untranslatable language, and embroidery, thus becoming an instrument for cultural and historical conservation and Welsh representation.
Funus, Fumus, Fuimus, Ecce
‘Funus, Fumus, Fuimus, Ecce’ is a fabricated enquiry into how subjective re-enactments of personal and collective histories can epitomise the complexity of language.
Through the culmination of found objects, traditional photographic techniques, and unintelligible and untranslatable text, I attempt to reveal a preservation of primitive Welsh culture, identity, and inheritance. The underpinning of ambiguity through indecipherability tempts to thread ideas around the phenomelogical qualities of my own spirit, of significant objects, and the esoteric notions of a past life, knotting the skin of palimpsest in an attempt to heal ambivalent time, memory, and epistemologies.
I testify that my past lives disintegrate like a “corpse, a memory, and a ghost”, all mockeries of loss that I urge myself to keep nearby. To whatever degree of death my language may defy, I will remain a foreword to a scripture of my own testimony, for as long as I wish to remember.
Putting Old Ghosts to Rest
This dissertation is an auto-fictional unfolding of three corresponding narratives between a personification of my infant self, Gwen; the ghost of her past life, Mair Wyn; and myself, the spectral voice of timelessness and testimonial history. I intermittently reach into Gwen and Mair Wyn’s diary entries, written two centuries apart, responding to their evocative relationship to history, folklore, nature, and grief. The dialogues begin to shape their entrenched attraction for solitude through writing. The story is an eventual search for truth through the function of words, memory, and spirits. To name but a few, significant examples of literature and theory include Georges Perec’s W or The Memory of Childhood, Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting, and The Tales of the Mabinogion (Author unknown). Embedding a contrast in voices between my various characters and those of literature and theory allows juxtapositions between testimony and remembering.
Project Links
Archival Collection
The ghost story of Lady Mathias
