Major New Nation Wide Jeremy Deller Commission for National Gallery Bicentenary Comes To North Wales
This summer, Mostyn in Llandudno joins forces with leading Welsh language theatre company Frân Wen and Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller to create a groundbreaking, youth-led performance and coinciding major exhibition of works by Jeremy Deller and emerging Welsh artists at Mostyn….
For the first time, Mostyn are working in co-production with leading theatre company, Frân Wen, and Jeremy Deller, to produce a youth-led procession and movement piece for The Triumph of Art, commissioned by the National Gallery to close their NG200 Bicentenary Celebrations. Events will take place on the streets of Llandudno and at Mostyn on the 21 June and in collaboration with Cadw for a solstice event at Bryn Celli Ddu on 22 June, traveling on to Trafalgar Square for a closing event on July 26. Find full press details for the event in London here.
Carreg Ateb: Vision or Dream? is inspired by images from the Manod archive of paintings from the National Gallery travelling through the North Wales landscape for safekeeping underground. Using this as inspiration, Frân Wen young company have developed a processional performance in collaboration with Deller that will trace a journey beginning in a slate quarry landscape, with the transformation of North Wales teenagers to their imagined mythical selves.
The work – a procession – will open the summer show at Mostyn on the 21 June which has been co-curated with Jeremy Deller, including new commissions by five early career Welsh artists. Esyllt Angharad Lewis, Gweni Llwyd, Lewis Prosser, Llyr Evans and Sadia Pineda Hameed will produce a series of site and theme responsive commissions which will be shown alongside objects from the National Museum of Wales, Llandudno Museum, Storiel Museum, and works by Jeremy Deller including the short documentary “So Many Ways To Hurt You, The Life And Times of Adrian Street, 2010, “The Uses of Literacy”, 1997 and a newly commissioned banner in collaboration with Ed Hall. The exhibition at Mostyn is curated by Jeremy Deller, Kalliopi Tsipni Kolaza, Mostyn’s curator, Joanna Wright, Art Fund Assistant Curator and the Frân Wen Young Company.
On the 22 June, to celebrate the summer solstice weekend, Deller, Frân Wen young company, community members, and special guests from the other Celtic nations will convene to bring alive Bryn Celli Ddu’s architectural forms through music, movement and procession, in a celebratory outdoor public gathering, in collaboration with Cadw, Think Creatively, supported by the Arts Council of Wales.
As part of the project, free public programming will also take place across the summer at Mostyn, including a series of riso workshops, film screenings, talks and archive tours and a research residency in collaboration with grassroots artist led space CARN, reflecting on themes such as castle takeovers, quarry strikes and rave culture, embodying the unique cultural and linguistic character of the area.
The project is taking place as part of The Triumph of Art, a nation-wide project by artist Jeremy Deller. It was commissioned by the National Gallery, London, as part of NG200, its Bicentenary celebrations. The Triumph of Art is being developed in partnership with Mostyn in Llandudno, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee, The Box in Plymouth and The Playhouse in Derry-Londonderry. Supported by Art Fund.
The Box in Plymouth, Mostyn in Llandudno, The Playhouse in Derry/Londonderry and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in Dundee will all be partnering with the National Gallery. These organisations mark a significant expansion in the National Gallery’s partnership strategy, including for the first time a performing arts venue in The Playhouse, and the first formal partnership with an art school (or college) in Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, part of the University of Dundee.
Jeremy Deller said, “I’m very happy to be working in Wales with Mostyn and Frân Wen as part of my commission with the National Gallery. North Wales has such a rich and layered history, and it’s been exciting to explore its cultural and social narratives through this project. I first came here as a child on a school trip, someone in my family lent me a camera, and from that moment on, I never wanted to put it down.”
Clare Harding, Interim Director at Mostyn said “We are delighted to be bringing this project to Wales, to be able to build a new partnership with Fran Wen so that we can involve so many young people in this special project, and providing new opportunities for Welsh emerging artists and creatives.
Joanna Wright, Art Fund project curator at Mostyn said “This project has been an amazing opportunity for Mostyn to forge new connections with artists and organisations beyond the gallery and to work with the other partner organisations in across the UK Nations to collaborate not only for this project, but also to build future relationships that support the vital arts ecosystem in north Wales”.
Emily Stone, Project Curator at the National Gallery, said, “It has been fantastic to explore the rich landscape of North Wales and to work with the story of the landscape as protector – when the Gallery’s Collection was stored in Manod Slate Quarry during the Second World War. We have been able to weave the mythologies from the Collection, and the folklore, culture and politics of North Wales into this new layered work with Jeremy Deller, Mostyn, Frân Wen and many other creatives. It is a celebration of place, storytelling, myth making and youth”
Gethin Evans, Artistic Director of Frân Wen, shared his excitement: “Collaboration is in our DNA, and this project is something truly special. Working alongside Jeremy Deller, Mostyn, and our incredible Young Company, we’re igniting a bold celebration of creativity, history, and the power of art to shape our futures. This is a unique opportunity for young people from Wales to take centre stage.”
Dr Ffion Reynolds, Senior Heritage Events & Arts Manager for Cadw, said “This project has forged new relationships and partnerships in north Wales, and it also brings the Celtic nations together to celebrate at Bryn Celli Ddu on the 22nd of June. This is a fantastic opportunity for Welsh audiences to celebrate the arts and the fantastic archaeology and heritage that Ynys Môn, Gwynedd and Conwy has to offer.”
Notes
The Triumph of Art, including its constituent research and public programme, is developed with close links to the communities and geography of all partners. Each will research, develop and stage a local element, before the collaborative projects will join together. Deller has been researching and cataloguing events on Trafalgar Square as a history of celebration, commemoration and demonstration, collecting countless instances of joy and art in activism. The Triumph of Art will culminate in a major event on Trafalgar Square in July 2025, drawing to a close the NG200 year-long festival of art and looking to the start of the Gallery’s next century.
Frân Wen has been elevating the voices of communities in Wales since 1984.
It’s a leading Welsh language theatre company making spectacular and unique live performances through bringing young people, artists and communities together.
Nyth, it’s brand new home in Bangor, is a hub for artists to develop their craft, experiment and connect with others from across the world. A home for artists to dare to do what they can’t do anywhere else.
Rooted in North West Wales, it imagines the unimaginable ways empathy, diversity and equality can better our lives today and fuel the lives of those tomorrow.
About Jeremy Deller
Jeremy Deller (b. 1966, London) studied History of Art at the Courtauld Institute and at Sussex University. He began making artworks in the early 1990s, often showing them outside conventional galleries. In 1993, while his parents were on holiday, he secretly used the family home for an exhibition titled Open Bedroom. Four years later he produced the musical performance Acid Brass with the Williams-Fairey Band and began making art in collaboration with other people. In 2000, with fellow artist Alan Kane, Deller began a collection of items that illustrate the passions and pastimes of people from across Britain and the social classes. Treading a fine line between art and anthropology, Folk Archive is a collection of objects which touch on diverse subjects such as Morris Dancing, gurning competitions, and political demonstrations. The Folk Archive became part of the British Council Collection in 2007 and has since toured to Shanghai, Paris and Milan.
In 2001 Deller staged The Battle of Orgreave, commissioned by Artangel and Channel 4, directed by Mike Figgis. The work involved a re-enactment which brought together around 1,000 veteran miners and members of historical societies to restage the 1984 clash between miners and police in Orgreave, Yorkshire. In 2004, Deller won the Turner Prize for Memory Bucket (2003), a documentary about Texas. He has since made several documentaries on subjects ranging from the exotic wrestler Adrian Street to the die-hard international fan base of the band Depeche Mode.
In 2009 Deller undertook a road trip across the US, from New York to Los Angeles, towing a car destroyed in a bomb attack in Baghdad and accompanied by an Iraqi citizen and a US war veteran. The project, It Is What It Is, was presented at Creative Time and the New Museum, New York and the car is now part of the Imperial War Museum’s collection. In the same year he staged Procession, in Manchester, involving participants, commissioned floats, choreographed music and performances creating an odd and celebratory spectacle. During the summer of 2012 Sacrilege, Deller’s life-size inflatable version of Stonehenge – a co-commission between Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art and the Mayor of London – toured around the UK to great public acclaim.
In 2013 Deller represented Britain at the Venice Biennale with a multi-faceted exhibition titled, English Magic. Encompassing notions of good and bad magic, socialism, war, popular culture, archaeology and tea, the exhibition gave a view of the UK that was both combative and affectionate. His First World War memorial work – We’re Here Because We’re Here (2016) and the documentary Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984–1992 (2019), have influenced the conventional map of contemporary art. Most recently Deller has published Art is Magic, a book that documents key works in his career alongside the art, pop music, film, politics and history that have inspired him.
About the National Gallery
The National Gallery is one of the greatest art galleries in the world. Founded by Parliament in 1824, the Gallery houses the nation’s collection of paintings in the Western European tradition from the late 13th to the early 20th century. The collection includes works by Bellini, Cézanne, Degas, Leonardo, Monet, Raphael, Rembrandt, Renoir, Rubens, Titian, Turner, Van Dyck, Van Gogh and Velázquez. The Gallery’s key objectives are to enhance the collection, care for the collection and provide the best possible access to visitors. Admission free. More at www.nationalgallery.org.uk
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About the collaborators:
Llyr Evans is a visual artist from Anglesey whose work explores the intersections of history, storytelling, and identity. He graduated with a first-class BA (Hons) from Central Saint Martins in summer 2024 and returned to Wales to focus on creating work that delves into personal and collective narratives, examining how they intersect with broader cultural and emotional landscapes.
In 2023, he was awarded the Young Artist Scholarship at both the Eisteddfod Genedlaethol and Eisteddfod yr Urdd. These opportunities enabled him to travel to Patagonia, Argentina, where he documented Welsh-speaking communities. The resulting project explored the layered connections between Wales and its diaspora, emphasising how memory and identity are continually reframed.
Through research, lens-based media, and sound, his practice investigates the tension between expectation and reality—whether in relationships, rituals, or systems of value. By reframing familiar actions and traditions, he invites audiences to reconsider overlooked histories and reflect on their evolving significance.
Gweni Llwyd is an artist from Dyffryn Nantlle who works across tactile and digital realms. Her practice playfully weaves together personal, collective and more-than-human experiences, drawing our attention to how all life is part of a messy, shared metabolism. Recent projects include: RIB Summer Lab Residency Rotterdam (2024); SWAY Barry (2024); Elan Links Residency (2023); Traces of a Cathode, s1 artspace (2023); I Must Be Living Twice, ECC at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022); One Day Home, W139, Amsterdam (2022); Silicon Retina, Green Man Festival (2021); Jerwood UNITE, g39 (2021); Milan Machinima Festival (2021). Gweni has received fellowships, prizes and awards such as the National Eisteddfod of Wales Young Artist Scholarship (2018); Arts Council of Wales Brian Ross Memorial Award (2018); ABF Step Change Fellowship (2017-2018). Gweni has an MA in Fine Art from Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam and a BA in Fine Art from Cardiff School of Art and Design.
Esyllt Angharad Lewis is an artist from Craig-Cefn-Parc, Wales. Her work across performance, drawing, printmaking and moving image plays with the visual and oral tension of translation. She won the Ifor Davies Award at the 2024 National Eisteddfod in Pontypridd for her performance Blobus a Phryderon Eraill (Jellyfish and other worries).
Lewis Prosser is an absurdist basketmaker based in the Vale of Glamorgan. He studied Painting and Printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art and then later participated in the unaccredited, self-organised MA course: The School Of The Damned. As a basketmaker he is self taught with particular experience in rural straw crafts and willow stake-and-stand basketry. He uses craft and performance to explore themes of regional identity, cultural exchange, and civic ceremony. His practice examines how basketry documents our changing relationship with ‘ ‘stuff,’ and offers new ways to articulate history, place, and memory through speculative forms.
Sadia Pineda Hameed is a Filipina Pakistani artist and writer whose work explores latent ways to speak about collective and intergenerational trauma through inherent anticolonial strategies of dreaming, telepathic communion and secrets. Using film, installation, text and performance, her work further imagines what future tools for resistance, value and communication springing from these strategies might look like.
Her practice is led by a process of cross-disciplinary semiotic and associative journeying in resistance to western processes of historicization and displacement. Mythmaking, melodrama and decoy become playful devices to speak through a ‘delirious discourse’ where personal archives and collective experiences converge. She also runs print, radio and curatorial project LUMIN.
Edith Morris is a Welsh artist and filmmaker based in Bristol, UK. Her work is inspired by folklore and traditional craft and works with ceramics, wood and metal. She also works within the world of experimental 16mm film, art direction, costume and set design.
“Carreg Ateb” is the name of a rock believed to cause an echo, an answering stone. In this context “Carreg Ateb” refers to some kind of animate resonance, connected with an aspect of the local geology and landscape.
