Mia Gwenllian (b.2001) is a Welsh 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’s practice scopes a continuum of ephemeral experimentation that often references the foundations of Phenomenology, where the enmeshment of lived experience becomes the primary source of influence. 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.
Mia’s latest, yet embryonic body of work titled “What, Don’t You Recognise Me?” experiences a shifting dichotomy of purely Welsh iconography to larger philosophical musings, divulging her metaphysical relationship with language. There is a severe sense of protection when the privacy of her own language is guided by auspicious signs and a deep bearing of the spirit-world, where Mia fabricates remnants of old books with words extracted from their once full-bodied syntax, thus dismantling authorial ownership, into a form of her own. She uses embroidery to channel the disjuncture of lived and unlived experience, ceasing the turning of pages with needle and thread as a symbol of her own consciousness, transition and evanescence.
