Gwen Siôn
Gwen Siôn is an award-winning 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 her own handmade electronic instruments and experimental sound devices by recycling found objects and natural materials. Exploring relationships between sound and environment, nature, technology, mythology and ritual, Gwen uses non-traditional composition methods inspired by reading landscapes as scores, alongside extended techniques, sound design, sampling, electronic manipulation, field-recordings and hydro-recordings, and collects physical fragments of the landscape to create her instruments. She is interested in 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, gaining support from Arts Council Wales, Arts Council England, The Arts Foundation, Sound and Music, PRS Foundation, Opera North, Sound UK, Ty Cerdd, Oxford Contemporary Music, Wales Millennium Centre, Atelier11 Paris, Greywood Arts Ireland, StokkoyArt Norway, University of the Arts London, BBC, Netflix, Leland Music, LMVH, Sustainability First and Liquid Listening.
Residency Works
The River Breathes
2026 – on-going
one-channel video with sound and color
duration: 7 minutes 3 seconds
The River Breathes is an on-going project by composer and multidisciplinary artist Gwen Siôn, tracing connections between rivers in Wales and Vietnam. Gwen focuses on both rural and urban river systems, from Gwen’s hometown in North Wales working with the rivers of Dyffryn Ogwen (a glacial valley in Eryri’s mountains) to the waterways of Ho Chi Minh City and the Mekong Delta in Southern Vietnam. Through this work, she aims to explore our shifting human relationships with urban and natural environments amid the climate emergency and what the rivers mean to us.
Following a period of on location working in both Wales and Vietnam, Gwen is developing a new music composition alongside documentation of her river visits using both digital and analogue photography on expired 35mm film, moving image and graphic scores. Musical gestures echo movements in water as the composition blends fragments of oral histories gathered from conversations with Welsh and Vietnamese communities with mixed electronics, piano, saxophone, sounds from Gwen’s handmade instruments of Welsh slate and recordings of musician Phạm Thế Vũ using traditional Southern Vietnamese instruments alongside field recordings, hydro-recordings (underwater recordings) and data sonification using environmental data on river health provided by ArtEO.
As we speak to the rivers, the rivers also speak back – a water song remembers those who have left, carrying an elegy for them with every current. As the river is alive, it moves through the idea of ownership, tracing every folklore, myth and names to the remnants of industrialization. As the river speaks, it also mourns—carrying the slow loss of the environment, and memories, within its flowing breath.
Locations include rivers in Dyffryn Ogwen, Saigon, Cần Giờ Biosphere Reserve – Mangrove Forest, Bến Tre (Vĩnh Long province) and Ba Tri (a coastal town of previously-known Bến Tre province).
The project is supported by the British Council X PRS Foundation Musician in Residence 2026 programme and the ArtEO Earth Stories 2026 programme. We also want to extend a heartfelt thank you to Phạm Thế Vũ for contributing sounds of traditional Vietnamese instruments, to Can and his family for sharing local knowledge and generously hosting in the Mekong Delta region and to the contributors in both Wales and Vietnam for their thoughtful conversations.
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