Gwen Siôn is an experimental composer, producer, pianist and multidisciplinary artist working with sound, sculpture, DIY electronics, video and installation. She creates multi-instrumental, vocal and electronic compositions, and designs and builds her own handmade electronic instruments and experimental sound devices by recycling found objects and natural materials. She is interested in the relationship between sound and environment, ecology, mythology, ritual and synaesthetic crossover, particularly the dynamic between colour and musical notation. Gwen often use non-traditional composition methods inspired by reading the landscape as a score, field recordings, hydrorecordings, and collects physical fragments of the landscape to create her instruments. Engaging in acts of translation and transformation, she interprets landscape in musical terms, exploring how composition can be used as a means of mapping space and the cultural, ecological and socio-political significance of space.
Gwen has worked on a broad range of music and sound projects, commissions, installations, exhibitions, performances and residencies throughout the UK and internationally, having gained support from organisations such as Arts Council England, Arts Foundation, Sound and Music, British Music Collection, PRS Foundation, Ty Cerdd, Wales Millennium Centre, Sound UK, Atelier11 Paris, Greywood Arts Ireland, StokkoyArt Norway, LMVH, MullenLowe, BBC, Sustainability First, Netflix, LelandMusic and Liquid Listening. Gwen’s work ‘HS2 Ghostlands’: a multi-disciplinary arts and environmental research project created in response to the climate emergency and HS2, which highlighted issues of deforestation, habitat destruction and biodiversity loss, won the 2021 LMVH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton ‘Maison/0 This Earth Award’ (a prize which champions sustainable art practice and works that advocate for nature), was nominated and shortlisted for the 2021 'MullenLowe NOVA Awards’ and was also shortlisted for the 2021 ‘Sustainability First Art Prize’. Gwen was also nominated for the 2023 Electronic Music Award (Arts Foundation Futures Awards), subsequently shortlisted and made one of only four category Finalists across the UK. Recently, Gwen has begun a new experimental live electronic music project working across genres using her own handmade instruments under the alias catHead.
