Mary Lloyd Jones at 90: Cardiff gallery hosts celebration of Welsh master

Stephen Price

Now in her ninth decade, Mary Lloyd Jones is one of Wales’ most treasured artists – and an exhibition featuring her vibrant and energetic works is currently taking place to celebrate her extraordinary and ongoing legacy.

Mary Lloyd Jones @ 90 runs until 6 October at Cardiff’’s Celf Gallery, one of Wales’ most esteemed galleries, showcasing available new works by the peerless Welsh painter.

Mary Lloyd Jones was born in Devil’s Bridge, Ceredigion in 1934. She trained at Cardiff College of Art and has exhibited widely since the mid 60’s.

Inspired by the landscape she worked on as a young girl with her parents, Mary’s work is a celebration of the rural environment and her roots.

Her work expresses her deep connection to Wales and the idea of cynefin; a sense of belonging and attachment to a particular place.

This sense of place is further strengthened by her own Welsh-language cultural inheritance.

She is a painter who uses abstraction to explore landscape, culture, history and identity. Her use of early alphabets, specifically the bardic alphabet of the 18th Century Welsh Bard, Iolo Morganwg ‘Coelbren’, and Ogham script is a reference to the otherness of Welshness.

Cynefin

Prominent features in her work are the traces and scars left by our ancestors and of industry.

She shared: “My aim is that my work should reflect my identity, my relationship with the land, an awareness of history, and the treasure of our literary and oral traditions. I search for devices that will enable me to create multilayered works.”

Mary is an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Carmarthen and the University of Aberystwyth. She also holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Wales, Cardiff, and is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

Over the years she has worked as an artist-in-residence in Scotland, Ireland, United States, India, Italy, Spain and France. Her work can be found in numerous public and private collections including the National Museum and Galleries of Wales and the National Library of Wales.

Discussing Mary Lloyd Jones and this most important of her exhibitions, Esyllt Angharad Lewis said: “Mary Lloyd Jones is known for her contemporary handling of history.”

“She juxtaposes ancient symbols and colours with her visionary perspective on the Welsh landscape. She renders old paths brand new with oils and textiles and an unexpected use of marks that forces the viewer to reimagine landscape in two ways.

“On the one hand, we are encouraged to look again at our known physical landscape – Cymru and her mountains and rivers and the traces of her industry. On the other hand, Jones’s thorough interrogation of the Welsh countryside, sometimes on canvasses bigger than any human body, calls into question the way these landscapes are traditionally depicted in visual art and writing for the outsider’s gaze: virginal land, smooth land, empty land.

“Mary Lloyd Jones uses paint to understand things, not to accessorize. Her work reveals and investigates relationships: the push and pull of land, history and language – between the visible and the unseen, colour and drudgery, loss and hope.

Lewis added: “Meeting her, six decades your senior, you cannot help but think that her relentless positivity and creativity have sustained her career, health and wellbeing for much longer than most of us could dream of. At her home in Aberystwyth, there are drawers and drawers of beautiful never-seen-before paintings and drawings, histories in layers: histories of personal, local and international importance.

“Looking at these, you realise that Mary’s capacity to pay attention to landscapes and peoples is unending. Take a moment whilst looking around this exhibition celebrating her 90 years of life, to think about the persistence of her vision as a female artist. She carved out a career of colour for herself, spanning many decades, art movements, political changes, waves of feminism and economic and climate crises.

“Force of nature are the best words in English I can use to describe her. The best English words. Because for me visual experiences, specifically looking at Mary Lloyd Jones’ landscapes, feel like they happen differently in Welsh as opposed to English.

“What does it mean to see visual work through the lens of a verbal language? Is this even possible?

“The shapes, colours and forms for me speak of and through the Welsh language. It is a naming and claiming of places through colour.”

“It is a visual resistance against the smoothening and flattening of other ways of being and seeing, it is a chromatic chaos of fields and symbols and skies to combat the chocolate box commodification of the Welsh countryside.

“It is scars, ruptures, interruptions, shocks of colour that slice across the romantic, palatable idealisation of places where people have actually lived, and are living now, and will be living still. In moving away from conventional representation, she brings clarity.

“Her paintings explain things differently, uncovering the tones, bruises, and complications of landscapes so familiar to her that they cannot be rendered perfect, blotchless, sanitised. They are messy, defiantly pushing against definition, letting the viewer do some digging…”

Penblwydd hapus, annwyl Mary Lloyd Jones.

Mary Lloyd Jones @ 90 takes place at Celf Gallery, Roath, Cardiff from 7 September to 6 October.