Artist presented as Fellow

The acclaimed artist Mary Lloyd Jones was presented by Professor Aled Jones as an Honorary Fellow of Aberystwyth University during the first of this year's degree ceremonies.

Professor Jones' introduction.

Anrhydeddus Lywydd, mae'n bleser gen i gyflwyno Mary Lloyd Jones i'w hurddo’n Gymrawd gan y Brifysgol.

Mr President, it’s a very great honour to introduce Mary Lloyd Jones to you as a Fellow of the University. In doing so we pay homage to one of Wales’s most distinguished and highly acclaimed visual artists, a painter of immense originality and the creator of a highly distinctive vision of the landscape and the human activity that has shaped and marked it.

She has drawn and painted the world around her since childhood, and has been exhibiting her work since 1966. Today, her paintings may be found in numerous private and public collections including the BBC, the National Library of Wales, the National Assembly for Wales and the Arts Council Collection.

You can also see some of her more recent work in the Martin Tinney Gallery in Cardiff. She has held solo shows in New York, London, Cologne and Oslo and more recently in Ireland, Italy, Spain and France.

I would draw your attention in particular to three aspects of her life and career.

Firstly, there are her deep associations with Aberystwyth. Born just a handful of miles upriver in Pontarfynach/Devil’s Bridge, she grew up in Aber’s rural hinterland and absorbed from a young age the shapes and tones of its landscape and the rhythms of its social and cultural life.

After studying here at the old Ardwyn Grammar School and later at the Cardiff College of Art, where she met her husband the artist John Jones, she moved to London, returning to Ceredigion permanently in 1961.

She has maintained a long and fertile relationship with the University’s Arts Centre, which hosted her 2001 exhibition, the Colour of Saying, while her 2006 collection Iaith Gyntaf/First Language, first appeared over the road in the National Library of Wales.

We are all very proud of the fact that she has now chosen to locate her studio in one of the new Thomas Heatherwick-designed buildings just outside, right in the heart of the campus and in the middle of its teeming student and academic life.

Which brings us neatly to the second significant attribute: she is a teacher, and has for at least five decades involved herself with the artistic development of people of all ages, from young children to adults, in schools, colleges and beyond.

From 1973 to 1986, she and her husband ran highly acclaimed art summer schools, first in Felinfach and later at their home in Aberbanc. She was appointed an Honorary Professor in the Aberystwyth University School of Art in 2006, and has taught as a resident artist in Europe, North America and India.

And finally, and most importantly of all, we have the body of her work as an artist. Her canvasses are instantly recognisable, above all perhaps by the seductive richness of colour and the bold expressionism of the composition. She entitled one of her own self-reflective essays simply as ‘Indigo and Purple Madder’, the colours speaking for themselves.

While I would urge you to seek out her fine figurative canvasses – portraits of her mother, her father and her daughter spring instantly to mind – most of her exhibited work explores or is inspired by the landscape that surrounds this myth-laden part of our island.

The Aberystwyth philosopher J.R.Jones, who was both a student and a lecturer here, coined the Welsh term ‘cydymdreiddad’ to describe the cultural charge produced by the mutual interpenetration of land, language, myth and memory. I think he would have recognised his concept in the densely imagined reworking of the land and its people that are so characteristic of Mary Lloyd Jones’s work.

Hers are lived-in landscapes, loved, often damaged. As she herself has described them, they ‘are ripped and torn’ and the folding, pleating, twisting of fabric, and the unexpected appearance of poetry and marks from secret alphabets, add further complexity and ambiguity to a visual language that is constantly evolving.

Wrth syllu ar ei chanfasau, mae’n anodd peidio meddwl, er enghraifft, am storiau Kate Roberts neu farddoniaeth Gwenallt. Er fod gwead gwahanol i’w thirwedd hi, eto mae Mary Lloyd Jones hefyd yn meddu ar yr un ddawn hynod brin yna o ddylunio’r gair a’r gerdd, a’u plethu i brofiad bywyd, a hynny mewn modd cwbl ddirdynnol.

And let’s not for a moment mistake this for a parochial vision – Mary Lloyd Jones speaks to universal concerns, of love and loss, of wildness and the marks left by human hand and brain on the natural world.

No surprise then that since 2007 her collection Gwreiddiau/Origins has been housed in the newly-designed Archaeological section of the National Museum of Wales.

Working in India has been major influence, and the startlingly vibrant colours of Rajastan, where fields of ochre lit by indigo, magenta and iridescent reds have left their mark on her visual imagination.

Her paintings will perhaps have a special resonance for those of you who are graduating this week, and who have lived in and with this physical and cultural landscape during your years as Aberystwyth students.

May that experience help you read the stories that Mary Lloyd Jones tells in her paintings, and may they in turn remind you, for years to come, of the magic and beauty of this place.

The National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke, wrote this of her when they were both simultaneously working on projects on the landscape and mythology of Llyn y Fan Fach, ‘She paints with rain. A slab/of sunlight. A field dry-edged with walls./All the colours of light.’ Her work continues to challenge, to intrigue, to delight, and to bring to the visual culture of Wales and the wider world, an unmistakably distinctive palette.

Mr Llywydd, mae’n wir fraint ac yn bleser gennyf gyflwyno Mary Lloyd Jones i ti fel Cymrawd Prifysgol Aberystwyth.