Y Cwm Du

 

My pictures are from a body of work about wildfire burning that takes place each year at the end of Spring in the South Wales Valleys. The work is concerned with youth and landscape and has an association with the mining of coal from the South Wales minefields.  

 

For many years the landscape of the South Wales Valleys was synonyms with the pollution caused by heavy industry, the grass and rivers were black from the soot and coal dust, and the people lived amongst towering coal tips and waste heaps.  

 

These days, the hills are laden with memory and scarred from a century of destructive coal mining and dumping of industrial waste. Slowly, the trees are growing back, the rivers are flowing with fish, yet the burning of land by bored youth threatens to turn this now cherished landscape into a polluted blackened landscape of times gone by.  

 

By highlighting the similarities of our past and present landscape it’s my hope that with education and insight, the long-running polluted narrative of the South Wales Valleys can be finally put behind us.