A mother and daughter deliver Swansea College of Art St David’s Day lecture.

28.02.2022

The artist Meinir Mathias and her daughter, the singer Mari Mathias, will be giving a lecture on their careers and working bilingually in the creative industries as part of UWTSD Swansea College of Art’s St David’s Day celebrations.

Swansea College of Art holds an annual lecture and awards on St David’s Day in order to celebrate and be proud of the use of the Welsh language by creatives that succeed.

The lecture will be available to view on-line at 3pm on St David’s Day, when they will both discuss their experiences and creative successes in Wales and beyond.

UWTSD is very close to their hearts as they both graduated from the University. Meinir graduated with a BA in Fine Art followed by an MA in Fine Art from UWTSD’S Carmarthen campus, and Mari is one of Cardiff’s BA Perfformio course graduates.

Meinir Mathias is a Modern Welsh Painter. Her work explores ideas relating to industrial memory, history, land and people. Her work is rooted in Wales’s culture yet is linked to personal experience and memory. Her work often draws on historic events and folk imagery and it challenges the complex human relationship with land and history. Meinir brings Welsh cultural events and historic characters to life by reimagining them in a contemporary context.

Having studied a BA and MA in Fine Art, Meinir went on to work as an Art lecturer for some years before giving all her time to working as a full-time artist, and now has a studio in Ceredigion.

Meinir’s work has been exhibited in many prominent galleries including the Modern Wales exhibition in the Waterfront Gallery, National Library of Wales, Oriel Myrddin, Canfas Gallery in Cardigan, RCA Conwy and Mimosa Gallery Llandeilo. She continues to develop her work by preparing for her next solo shows in North Wales in Oriel Plas Glyn y Weddw this year and Ffin y Parc Gallery next year. She has been commissioned to work on a number of projects for the BBC, Netflix, Bangor University, Barddas Publications and recently received attention as an artist on S4C’s programme ‘Cymru ar Gynfas’. A collection of her work has been bought by The National Library of Wales.

Mari Mathias is now famous as a Welsh singer and enjoys putting her own modern twist on traditional folk tunes. She is based in Cardiff having finished a Master’s degree in Song Writing and Production.

In recent years Mari has supported performers such as Gruff Rhys, Meic Stevens and Plu. She has performed at events from St Fagan’s Museum to HubFest, the Immersed Festival, Clwb Ifor Bach, Swansea Festival and the Big Cwtch Festival.

She released her EP ‘Ysbryd y tŷ’ in March 2020, which was produced by Mei Gwynedd, after winning the Battle of the Bands (Maes B) at the National Eisteddfod, 2019. Having graduated from the Forte Project, she now performs with a new and exciting ensemble of young folk musicians with their new material.

Meinir Mathias said,

“We’re both very proud to be speaking as part of this year’s St David’s Day programme. We will be discussing our journey from studying at the University through the medium of Welsh and how this has developed into working in the creative industry. We will discuss our opinion of the positive effects of bilingual education.

“We hope our chat about our experiences will be interesting, informative, and will give an honest description of the journey from being a student to being professional creative workers working in Wales today.

This lecture is part of the University’s ‘Little Things’ campaign that takes pride in the Welsh language, and lecturer Gwenllian Beynon who has organised it all says:

“我是Meinir导师在喀麦登在2006 - 2009, and seeing her career developing and becoming so successful has been extremely interesting. As Mari is Meinir’s daughter I’ve also seen her develop and succeed as a musician and I’m so pleased that they are both coming to present the lecture this year.

“They both work with Welsh themes and are extremely knowledgeable about what they include in their creative work.”

In addition to Meinir and Mari’s lecture, Swansea College of Art’s artists in residence have also organised live sessions on the campus to celebrate St David’s Day, where they will be drawing the Welsh Lady. These sessions will also be live-streamed on social media.

The annual award ceremony for the Art College’s students’ contributions to the Welsh language will also be held during the afternoon, and will continue to the end of the month.

Note to Editor

If you'd like to join the lecture please contactGwenllian Beynon

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