Telling the story of a sculpture, a limited edition, 90+ page full colour catalogue with writing from Mark Hopper, Dave Fordham and Robert Macfarlane.
In 2018 the sculptor Laurence Edwards was commissioned by Doncaster Council, with money raised through a crowd funding campaign, for a sculpture commemorating the mining history of Doncaster.
For several months Laurence Edwards toured the pubs, clubs and community halls of the Doncaster region, speaking to miners and mining families in the town and its surrounding villages. Then he began a remarkable process, positioned somewhere between oral history and performance art. He would meet up to three miners a day, and with each person would sit for two hours, modelling their heads in buttery yellow wax, while talking with them and drawing out their stories. Each of these conversations was recorded, resulting in a film that chronicles the emergence of a portrait in real time as well as the life story of a miner.
Earlier this year, A Rich Seam was installed next to the Frenchgate centre in the town centre. The figure of a ‘listening miner’ stands between two 20 tonne pieces of York Stone, quarried in Huddersfield, and bronze faces of individual miners sit in hand made crevices, like a seam or ‘book of coal’ carved into the giant rock.
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One of the few sculptors who casts his own work, Laurence Edwards is fascinated by human anatomy and the metamorphosis of form and matter that governs the lost-wax process.