Untitled Large Sculpture - Garth Evans

Untitled Large Sculpture by Garth Evans in front of Alfred Wallace Building, Upper Glyn Tâf Campus 2021, Photograph by Tom Keighley.

In 1972 Garth Evans created this large-scale sculpture for the streets of Cardiff. It was placed on the Hayes in the city centre for six months as part of the Peter Stuyvesant City Sculpture project, a ground-breaking and significant chapter in the history of public art. For the first time abstract contemporary art was encountered by a sceptical public at street level, not in a gallery or on a plinth.

Untitled Large Sculpture by Garth Evans photographed on The Hayes Cardiff in 1972

Garth chose South Wales as the location for this work because of strong family connections. The sculpture’s form, evoking both a hammer-like tool and the image of a mine tunnel as “black as coal”, was influenced by his grandfather’s accounts of life as a miner. 

My mother grew up in the small mining village of Pencoed and my grandfather and my mother’s brothers were coal miners in the region. As a child, I spent summers in South Wales and I vividly remember listening to my uncles talk of their lives underground, in the dark. I wanted to make something that I felt had a connection to the coal mining and steel making industries of South Wales.

After the project, the sculpture remained unseen by the public for nearly fifty years. In 2019 a successful crowdfunding campaign led by Chapter Arts Centre enabled the successful restoration of the sculpture. 

In recognition of the history of this University and its original identity as the South Wales and Monmouthsire School of Mines, Garth Evans has generously gifted this work to our collection. 

Images of the sculpture being installed at Upper Glyn Tâf were taken by Mike Davies.