Cwm: The Fair Country

In the mid 1990s, Ken Grant began to photograph in the South Wales Valleys, as communities came to terms with the closure of mines after strikes and protest a decade before.

To those who know the immersive work he made over decades amongst his contemporaries in Liverpool, Cwm -The Fair Country might seem like a departure. Yet, in parallel, Grant has worked steadily in the Valleys for more than a quarter of a century, to approach similar themes of labour and endurance in a new way. Working amongst communities who have weathered changes in a region once sustained by mining and steel, he weaves scenes of the former industrial terrain and ribboned valley housing through photographs of the many teams of wild horses left to move through it for pasture, in a layered and tender account of a region that would eventually become his home.

A hill is studded in canvas to keep a former coal tip from risk of landslip and tragedy; a playground stands firm as the steel plant that once surrounded it is dismantled. The horses have witnessed what industry did to the Welsh valleys and its people over centuries and stand, with stoic beauty, long after the furnaces and mines have quietened. Ken Grant's photographs stand as a singular account of a region often photographed. In work built over decades, Cwm -The Fair Country foregrounds beauty, scars and the signs of lives that persist despite the weight of an industry's passing.