Cwm Coke Works

In 2018 I was awarded a Queen Elizabeth Scholarship to support a fellowship at the City and Guilds of London Art School. Part of the fellowship application was to include a project proposal. My practice focuses on recording derelict buildings which contain historic and social significance that are in danger of being lost. My project proposal for the Guild was to document the obsolete mining culture in Wales after stumbling across many abandoned sites whilst visiting. I came to realise that these transient sites are often overlooked and our heritage of industry is slowly vanishing. Over the past six months I have been returning to the welsh countryside in search for hidden decaying structures. Drawing and producing prints of my findings give these locations a second voice, capturing their once thriving engineering past. This is an ongoing project. One of the sites I have heavily focused on is the Cwm Coke Works site in the Rhondda Valley. Abandoned in 2002 the site is steep in coal history which shouts out to be documented before it is bulldozed to make way for ‘affordable’ housing.
For Paper Trail I have used the paper to print a section of an etching plate that I created documenting the derelict Cwm Coke Works in South Wales. It links to the paper and the date of 1957 as at this time the colliery started to produce coke.