To: 20 Apr 2024, 3 p.m.
Location: Taliesin Arts Centre, Swansea University, Singleton Park, SA2 8PZ, Swansea
A collaboration between the South Wales Miners’ Library and Swansea Print Workshop to celebrate the SWML’s 50th anniversary
Showcasing a new collection of work by SPW printmakers
With a suite of work by Paul Peter Piech from Coal, A Sonnet Sequence
Exploring the rich resource of the South Wales Miners’ Library – an extensive collection of banners and books, testimonies, posters and plans – SPW printmakers made discoveries and connections with the people and land that have been touched and shaped by the coal mining industry in this area of Wales.
In the year marking the forty-year anniversary of the significant Miners’ Strike of 1984, it seems very apposite to be showing alongside MinersImprint, a suite of prints by Paul Peter Piech drawn from the Cultural Collections of Swansea University.
These prints are illustrations from Coal, A Sonnet Sequence by John Gurney published in 1994, to mark the closure of the Tower Colliery, the last deep coal mine in South Wales.
The close and uncompromising observations in his work demonstrate the artist’s long-standing intimacy and solidarity with miners’ lives and the mining communities.
The late Hywel Francis, MP for Aberavon 2001–2015 and a founder of the South Wales Miners’ Library commented in the publication Foreword: “They tell a story of an age and time that is gone, or so it seems, but it is an age and time which still invades the present ...”
The new collection of work by SPW contemporary printmakers invites us to share knowledge and to educate ourselves about life in the past and to remember and recognise the imprint of mining history on our lives today. It reflects the role and importance of collections like the SWML for our collective understanding of the social fabric and dynamics – past, present and future – of communities across south Wales and beyond.
Continues with exclusive access every Saturday and Sunday from 21 April to 26 May, 9am-5pm and Friday 10 May 9am-10pm.
Taliesin is fully accessible to visitors. Exhibition space is in lower ground floor open studio space.
Event created by: a.g.collins