While an exhibition of the work of local artist and printmaker Mary Lloyd Jones attracts visitors to the National Library of Wales’s Gregynog Gallery from July 2026 to April 2027, I’d like to draw attention to a small collection of various material which celebrates the life and work of Mary Lloyd Jones’s daughter, the singer, composer and musician Sianed Elin Jones.
‘Celebrate’ is an entirely appropriate term because what we find in the Sianed Elin Jones Papers within fewer than half a dozen grey boxes are selected highlights of the creative, energetic and enthusiastic output of this multi-talented woman over a span of some forty years until her untimely death in January 2022 at the age of 62.
The majority of the collection comprises material relating to music and multi-media projects, events and workshops which Sianed created, co-ordinated and in which she participated over the years. She was a member of musical groups Garam Masala, Dancing with the Dog and Joglaresa and of theatrical groups such as Blood Group, Marginal Voices and Brith Gof. Then there was her collaborative work with, amongst others, dancer and choreographer Henrietta Hale, storytellers Christine Watkins and Ben Haggerty, multi-media artists Philip Jeck, Cris Cheek and Jacob Whittaker, visual artist Maria Hayes and singer-musician Ailsa Mair Hughes, not forgetting the joint project works created alongside her mother, Mary Lloyd Jones, which includes the 2002 audio/visual collaboration ‘Lliwio’r Gair’ / ‘The Colour of Saying’.
The only way to bid farewell to someone of Sianed’s nature was in a manner akin to the way she had lived – on a high note, amongst family, friends and fellow performers. A celebration of her life was held on the 13th of August 2022 at the Small World Theatre, Cardigan; prior to that, in June of the same year, a band of those friends gathered together on Llangrannog beach to deliver Sianed’s ashes into the sea in Cardigan Bay.
The Atlantic tide may have taken Sianed’s corporeal remains into its embrace on that summer day in 2022, but her spirit continues to blaze a meteor trail from within this collection of her papers.
*‘Shimmering Through the Sky’ was a vocal/dance performance project co-created by Sianed Jones.