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Thomas Llyr James – Fine Artist & Craft Educator
Thomas Llyr James is a Welsh artist and educator whose work explores the relationship between material, landscape, and the existential. Working across sculpture, performance, photography, and poetry, he forms human–land narratives that engage the past through process, presence, and visceral interaction.
His practice investigates how cultural memory, sacred traditions, and material culture shape the way we experience the present and imagine possible futures. Drawing from Celtic heritage, ritual practices, and contemporary technological culture, his work moves between archaic symbolism and modern conditions.
James approaches land and materials not as passive tools but as living collaborators, entities shaped by human presence while also shaping how we live, act, remember, and even pray.
Across projects such as Celtica, MetaMetaMantra, and What a Waste, his work unfolds through both gallery installations and site-specific encounters. Here, art becomes a living process: a form of inquiry that reveals how individuals and communities inhabit, interpret, and transform the worlds they occupy.
Notions and Nuances, 2025-ongoing
"Notions and Nuances" is a nomadic installation piece which explores metaphor, traces, and space, delving into the 'invisible realms' existing just beyond reach. It calls for a reconsideration of the relationship between the viewer, the space, and the unseen connections that quietly shape our experiences. "Notions and Nuance" encourages a quiet exploration, asking us to reflect on the delicate interplay of what is and what might be.
The installation features the artist's signature use of ladders, this time made from translucent fabric, blurring the line between physical form and abstraction. Physically, ladders symbolise movement, while conceptually, they represent transcendence. James emphasises the idea that something can exist yet remain elusive to our senses, inviting viewers to explore presence within space—both tangible and metaphysical.
Urban Crofters, Cardiff, 2026
Galeri, Caernarfon, 2025
Galeri, Caernarfon, 2025
Urban Crofters, Cardiff, 2026
Image 1: Urban Crofters, as part of the Hadau: Holding the future group exhibition, February-May 2026
Image 2&3: Galeri Caernarfon, solo exhibition, part of the 'Ar Y Ffram' project, 2025.
Mental Load, 2025
Mental Load is an installation of marble tablets engraved with everyday lists, including daily schedules, student finance debt interest letters, calendars, and shopping lists. Inspired by the deciphered Sumerian copper receipt, one of the earliest known records of a mundane transaction, the work treats the mundane as a poetic condition of the present. Marble was chosen for its physical weight, reflecting the burden carried in the accumulation of everyday responsibilities and the mental load embedded in organising daily life, while capturing the social, domestic, and societal histories of the people living now.
Image 1&2: Mental Load, part of the 'Hypernormalisation' group show at Safe House, Peckham, UK, 2025
Holding Horizons, 2024
Holding Horizons is a series of sculptures which explore metaphysical themes of transcendence, philosophy, and reality. Inspired by the artist's first encounter with Turkey, where he observed the tension between environmental destruction and spiritual growth, James creates works that question sacredness, perception, and human connection to the world.
Using discarded precious materials and found objects, his sculptures form poetic, temple-like structures and ladders that guide viewers through a contemplative journey. Accompanied by a poetry guide, the series invites reflection, imagination, and a symbolic ascent from earth to sky, echoing the spiritual journey of the chakras.
Image 1: Holding Horizons, Soloshow, Bodrum, UK, 2024
The Thinker, 2023
Inspired by the Stone Garden of Sirjan (Bagh-e Sangi) in Kerman Province, Iran—where Darvish Khan Esfandiarpour suspended stones from dead trees as a silent protest—the artist created a site-specific installation within an olive grove along the Lycian Way in southern Turkey. Responding to the threat of overdevelopment in Kalkan, the work acted as a silent protest, using rocks to convey weight, presence, and sound while highlighting the pressures placed upon both the landscape and human experience.
The rocks symbolise the burdens of the mind, reflecting how external forces, legal, environmental, or societal, press upon the land and its caretakers, shaping the environment and self through time. The installation invites contemplation of responsibility, preservation, and the subtle interplay between human intervention and the natural world.
Which Shape Are You In?, 2019
"Hangi Şekildesin/ What shape are you in?" performance At Mamut Art Project, Istanbul, 2019. Performed in Mamut Art Project 2019 in Kucukciflik Park with Seher Deniz Kiran and Thomas Peter James.
The participatory-led performance invites audiences into a dialogue between two artists, one Yabanci and one Turkish citizen. The pair express their experiences of living turkey through body movements and spoken word, which creates a distinction between two different perspectives. This performance plays upon roles such as feminine and masculine energies and forms such as the fluidity and cyclic properties of a circle and the constructed static of the square. These shapes are used to represent such experiences in Turkey, from the recent elections to general life. The articulation of this language aims to evoke a social response from the audience, where they are invited to express their shape through this self-reflective, cross-cultural process.
An audience member's written feedback: "You accomplished going out of the line (the rules in different words), which takes captive, any more and you are free. This is time to think freely! You ask us to join this motion. You gave me a chalk to me to shape myself. I was shocked at that time and even I wanted to draw, I couldn't lift my hand to draw something. My brain was act as if in a traffic and I was watching the running cars. I got angry with me because of lacking of confidence. Welcome to my comfort zone! Maybe it was my taboo to get rid of. To be honest, I still keep that chalk as a memory of that day which is a beginning of new things".
Deniz Vural
'Untitled', Social Volumes, 2019
Note: This was an extremely sensitive piece for the people who organised and visited the exhibition.
An audience member's written feedback: "You accomplished going out of the line (the rules in different words), which takes captive, any more and you are free. This is time to think freely! You ask us to join this motion. You gave me a chalk to me to shape myself. I was shocked at that time and even I wanted to draw, I couldn't lift my hand to draw something. My brain was act as if in a traffic and I was watching the running cars. I got angry with me because of lacking of confidence. Welcome to my comfort zone! Maybe it was my taboo to get rid of. To be honest, I still keep that chalk as a memory of that day which is a beginning of new things".
Deniz Vural
Body as a Home (Lovers Valley), 2018
‘The Lover's Valley’, 2018: This photo series captured the encounters of two lovers, who have no choice but to realise their love in a ‘nowhere’ land. Being together in their normal lives was not an option, so they fled with hopes to live out their love. They travel towards the mystical hills of Cappadocia into a network of Byzantine dwellings hidden in the central Anatolian plains to find their 'home'.
Living this nomadic, adventurous and sometimes desperate life they began to form a different perspective of living; everyday tasks became symbolic and spiritual. Washing the clothes became a ritual; to cleanse the past, every meal was met with a full presence, and every home they discovered was entered and left with a gratitude they’d never known before.
Image 1: Holding Horizons, Solo show, Bodrum, UK, 2024
Celtica, 2012-2016
Celtica is an ongoing project exploring the landscapes and legacies of the British Isles through sites of Celtic significance. Beginning in 2014, the artist traveled to Neolithic cairns, stone circles, and other sacred sites, using ancient practices such as dowsing to uncover the histories embedded in these landscapes.
The work draws from materials found and discarded across the Isles, revealing traces of prehistoric and historic cultures—from hunter-gatherers and early farmers to metalworkers and modern craftsmen. Presented in the Off the Wall final degree show at Oxford Brookes University (Richard Hamilton Building, 2016), the installation invited viewers on a chronological journey through Britain’s past. Photography, sculpture, video, and archaeological objects guided visitors across eras, while participatory performances and dowsing experiments connected human presence to the stones, reflecting on the relationship between culture, identity, and the resilience of communities within their landscapes.
Image 1: Holding Horizons, Soloshow, Bodrum, UK, 2024
Forza, 2015
“Forza” is a photographic series that explores the metaphysical by imagining residual traces of human presence. Set within empty rooms and corridors, the works depict envisioned trails of light, suggesting movement, memory, and energy lingering beyond the physical body.
Image 1: Holding Horizons, Solo show, Bodrum, UK, 2024
Beneath the Skin, 2015
In this two-week performance, the artist explored metamorphism and shamanism by returning to the site where he discovered a deceased fox (road casualty) in Rural Powys, Wales, and living its life. He inhabited a burrow, ate like a fox, drank from the forest, and scavenged from local towns, fully immersing in the animal’s existence. Inspired by Joseph Beuys’s I Love America and America Loves Me, in which Beuys lived with a wild coyote in a gallery, 'Beneath the Skin' examined the boundaries between human and animal experience, mortality, and transformation. The performance was documented by the artist and presented at the Body Language Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, Palazzo Ca’ Zanardi, in 2015.
