The Machynlleth Tabernacle Trust is delighted to announce that the winner of the 2023 Glyndŵr Award is artist Eleri Mills.

 

The Glyndŵr Medal, which has been given annually since 1994, is awarded to pre-eminent figures in music, art and literature for their outstanding contribution to the arts in Wales. Previous winners of this award include artist Sir Kyffin Williams, poet Gillian Clarke and composer Karl Jenkins.

This year’s award will be presented to Eleri during the annual Gŵyl Machynlleth Festival in a ceremony with guest speaker Mari Griffith at 1pm on Friday 25th August, and will be accompanied by a select retrospective exhibition of Eleri’s works at MOMA Machynlleth from 24th June to 6th September.

Buy tickets for the ceremony here.

Of all the Welsh artists working today, Eleri Mills exhibits the strongest sense of art historical continuity in her choice of imagery. Nevertheless, the manner in which she interprets that imagery is entirely her own, and her meanings are for the present.
Peter Lord

Eleri Mills lives and works in rural Mid Wales, where she was born and brought up. During her forty-year plus career she has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad including the Museums of Modern Art Kyoto and Tokyo, Museu Textil d’Indumentaria, Barcelona and the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid. In 2009 a solo exhibition at the Senedd brought together a group of works titled ‘Landscape for princes’ and her work is featured in national collections which include the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh and the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. She won the Gold Medal at the 1987 National Eisteddfod of Wales, Porthmadog and was Chair of the Visual Arts Committee in 2003 and 2015 when the National Eisteddfod of Wales visited Meifod.

In 2010 she won the Arts Council of Wales’ Creative Wales Ambassador award which was followed by a three month residency in New York at Columbia University and a showing at SOFA NYC (the international art fair for Sculpture, Objects and Functional Art) at Park Avenue Armory. A more recent residency at Sanskriti Kendra, Delhi took place in 2016 Eleri has exhibited with Ruthin Craft Centre at Collect, the international art fair organised by the Crafts Council, firstly from 2004 to 2008 at the V&A Museum and most recently in 2017 and 2018 at London’s Saatchi Gallery. Eleri was awarded the Kyffin Williams Drawing Prize in 2021 and has been represented by Thackeray Gallery, London since 2000.

‘Eleri Mills stands alone as poet painter. Eleri records her love of her native land and she records it with great sensitivity and talent: for she is a superb draughtsman and this is at the heart of all that she does. In her art Eleri Mills has a voice which is seldom heard, for it is a tender voice and far removed from the cacophony of the art world today.’
Sir Kyffin Williams