A collaboration between Swansea University and Swansea Print Workshop to celebrate the South Wales Miners’ Library 50th anniversary
It is the power of visual arts to evoke a memory, an emotion, a recognition: the feel of a piece of coal, the rousing call of the brass band, the face of a relative, now gone. And to ask us to reflect upon others’ lives – their losses and struggles – as we too, are drawn into the depths, to breathe the dusty air with the dark pressing around us.
These prints invite 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.
First exhibited in April/May 2024, the MinersImprint collection of prints were created through a collaboration between Swansea University and Swansea Print Workshop to celebrate the South Wales Miners’ Library 50th anniversary.
The 21 limited edition prints are now on permanent display in the South Wales’ Miners Library at Y Storfa, Oxford Street, Swansea.
Please visit MinersImprint in our Archives for more information on the project. You can buy the MinersImprint publication from our Online Shop. Individual prints can be purchased from our Online Shop.
The MINERSIMPRINT collection of prints has additionally been exhibited at Queen Street Gallery, Neath in March 2025 and The Welfare, Ystradgynlais in October/November 2024 as part of their 90th year celebrations.
MINERSIMPRINT @ Queen Street Gallery | 40 Queen Street, Neath, SA11 1DL Wales, UK | 1 to 29 March 2025
We were delighted to show MinersImprint in the beautiful space at Queen Street Gallery.
Alongside MinersImprint, the exhibition also featured – from the archives of Swansea University – a great collection of Paul Peter Piech prints, depicting all aspects of the Welsh mining communities and their way of life.
And Farewell Rock – work by Hilary Powell, produced by the Josef Herman Art Foundation Cymru.
This project reconnected with Welsh roots through being awarded the Josef Herman Foundation Cymru Studio Residency at London’s Curwen studio specializing in lithography. The remit was to take inspiration from the work of Josef Herman – a Polish émigré artist who settled in the coal mining village of Ystradgynlais in the 1940s and created a body of work that portrayed the landscape and people.
Hilary Powell | Keith Gilbert Edwards | Dai | lithographs
MinersImprint @ The Welfare Ystradgynlais| Brecon Road, Ystradgynlais, Swansea, Powys, SA9 1JJ | 3 October to 30 November 2024
We were pleased to be part of The Welfare’s 90th year celebrations, giving us the opportunity to once again showcase the MinersImprint exhibition alongside the fabulous collection of Paul Peter Piech’s series, Coal, A Sonnet Sequence.
As part of the activities for The Welfare’s special Community Day for of their Autumn Rising coalfields community programming, printmaker and SPW member, Sarah Hopkins ran a printmaking workshop inspired by the MinersImprint exhibition.
All Paul Peter Piech images used by kind permission of Olwen Stocker.
