Gwen Siôn is an experimental composer, music producer and multidisciplinary artist working with sound, sculpture, DIY electronics, moving image and installation. She creates multi-instrumental, vocal and electronic compositions, and designs and builds her own handmade instruments and sculptural 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 uses non-traditional composition methods inspired by reading the landscape as a score, field recordings, hydrorecordings, and collects physical fragments of the landscape to create both acoustic and electronic 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, public installations, exhibitions, performances and residencies throughout the UK and internationally, having gained support from organisations such as Arts Council Wales, Arts Council England, The Arts Foundation, Sound and Music, British Music Collection, PRS Foundation, Sound UK, Ty Cerdd, Wales Millennium Centre, Jerwood Arts, Oxford Contemporary Music, Atelier11 Paris, Greywood Arts Ireland, StokkoyArt Norway, University of the Arts London, 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), won the 2021 LMVH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton ‘Maison/0 This Earth Award’ (a prize which champions sustainable arts practice and works that advocate for nature), was nominated and shortlisted for the 2021 'MullenLowe NOVA Awards’ and shortlisted for the 2021 ‘Sustainability First Art Prize’. Gwen was also nominated for the 2023 Electronic Music Award as part of the Arts Foundation Futures Awards, she was subsequently shortlisted and made one of only four category finalists across the UK. Funding awarded by Sound and Music's New Voices programme and Arts Council England DYCP supported Gwen to develop a new electronic music project called 'catHead', working across genres and using her own handmade instruments. As a result Gwen carried out a tour of live performances across the UK to launch the project between August and December 2023 and the accompanying debut EP is due to be released in 2024. Gwen is also currently developing an hour-long performance work for the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff which will premiere in October 2024. The new piece, titled 'Llwch a Llechi' [translation: Dust and Slate], is a live audio-visual performance project for concert venues exploring connections between music, landscape, language, tradition and folklore. The project combines elements of experimental electronic music, contemporary orchestral composition, choral composition (specifically informed by North Wales’ working-class tradition of slate quarrymen’s choirs) and moving image to create a unique and engaging live performance piece. The score will be written for and performed by an ensemble of 10 orchestral players, a 70-voice 4-part harmony male-voice choir, and Gwen using live electronics, including her hand-built electronic instruments made from recycled natural materials, primarily slate and oak.
" Gwen Sion's natural world of sound - combining political elements within her art, and her amazing ears, just a truly natural talent when it comes to sound and the creation of sound - as if nature is singing to you through her. "
– FINK aka Fin Greenall (music producer / singer-songwriter / DJ - jury member for the Electronic Music Award, Arts Foundation Futures Awards 2023)
