The allure of ruins
Treforest-based photographer Jon Pountney has spent many years documenting the remnants of Wales’ industrial past – and the results are on show in a milestone exhibition at TEN in Cardiff, writes Jenny White
JON POUNTNEY’S photographs form a unique contribution not only to art in Wales, but also to the way in which Wales’ history is recorded and understood.
Many traces of Wales’ world-leading industrial past have been removed, or left to decay. Pountney’s work not only documents those that remain, but also raises social, economic and political questions about what happens when an industrial boom is over.
“The work is to do with the history of Wales, but as time has gone on, it’s become also about the future of Wales,” he says. “When you think of the statues you see in Wales of these illustrious forefathers – these industrial bastions of industry – most, if not all of them, now look out on wastelands.
“It makes you wonder whether, at some point, a statue of someone like Bill Gates or Elon Musk is just going to be looking out of ruins.
“Will there be a point where enormous companies like Ford, or Microsoft, are gone?”
The work also asks what happens to the places and their communities after the industrial tides have receded.
“Wales was the first industrialised nation, but have we really benefited from that or has all the money just gone elsewhere?” asks Pountney.
“Government funding has not looked after industry, jobs, people’s lives and communities. The spaces I photograph are the same: not looked after. They’re all part of history, but Wales doesn’t look after its own history: it talks about castles and legends and dragons, but the actual real stuff that it’s given the world is just left to fall to pieces.”
His photographs evoke the broken majesty of these traces of industrial might. The work is surprisingly beautiful, and beautifully surprising. For example, one of his first post-industrial projects was an exploration of Splott foreshore in 2015-16.
“I was looking at the weird postindustrial detritus there – a whole beach made up of bricks,” he says. “I was fascinated to walk around there.”
His subsequent research revealed it was the result of a “slum” clearance in the 1970s.
“The small steelworks which was down there that was flattened, and some people say there was the original Queen Street station as well – they were all basically pushed into the sea and then flattened off; and that creates something mad, but which I think is beautiful.”
Work from this project is included in his new show at TEN in Cardiff, along with work from projects running right up to the present day. The Splott project, titled Beachcombing, was later followed by a project in Merthyr inspired by the epitaph on the tomb of RT Crawshay, of Cyfarthfa Castle, which said simply: “God Forgive Me.”
The work took him into Cyfarthfa blast furnace, which he recalls as “a huge and very spooky Victorian edifice, full of dark tunnels reminiscent of Lord of the Rings”.
There he was struck that there was a theme linking his projects: industry in Wales.
“From that point on, which would have been about 2018, I started looking at the map saying, ‘Where am I going to go today? What am I going to research today?’ It’s taken me all over the place, by luck or design.
“The work has built up quite organically over about 10 years – it’s been a labour of love. My work has always been about the landscape and the sense of place. It’s been very important to me to get out there and be within those landscapes.”
The work in the exhibition has been produced using either a Nikon DSLR or a drone – something he recently adopted to access new perspectives on hard-to-reach postindustrial sites. The resulting photographs are luscious and moody, the buildings standing monolithic in rewilded landscapes, or awkward and incongruous amid the trappings of 21st-century life.
“I often work in quite a specific light: not a clear blue sky; I like to have some clouds because I find that describes the details a lot better. But also, I found that some of these structures, unusually, photograph well in quite bad light.”
While this show focuses on photographs, Pountney is a versatile artist who also utilises paint, drawing and sound.
“I respond to one subject in whatever way suggests itself,” he explains.
His passion for photography goes back to his youth. Born in West Yorkshire, he came to Wales in 1999 to study Art and Aesthetics at UWIC at Howard Gardens in Cardiff. There he discovered a darkroom and spent most of his three-year course teaching himself photography.
After his degree, Pountney stayed in Wales, and photography continued to be a key part of his work. He cut his
teeth as a nightclub photographer at Jumpin Jaks in Cardiff – an experience he credits as being technically instructive, and also teaching him how to approach and handle human subjects.
Most recently, his work as a chronicler of Wales’ people and places has given him some unexpected opportunities: he was the production photographer on the set of Michael Sheen’s recently released three-part BBC drama The Way – a drama set in Port Talbot and centred around the steelworks – and his photograph of Capel Rhiw in Blaenau Ffestiniog is to be exhibited at the National Libra ry of Wales from May 10 in a major exhibition which will have Canaletto’s The Stonemason’s Yard as its centrepiece.
For Pountney, who lives in Treforest, these achievements, including the current show at TEN, are major milestones in a journey he traces back to his grandfather, a mining engineer who worked in three pits in West Yorkshire and was also an amateur photographer. Pountney believes he inherited his passion for photography from him – but perhaps he also inherited an affinity for industrial places.
Arguably, his outsider’s perspective has given him a keen awareness of the visual impact of former industrial sites in Wales. Having grown up in a different landscape, he has been deeply struck and seduced by the visual experience they offer.
“I’ve been lucky that people enjoy my work and kind of identify with it,” he says. “And I feel really lucky that Wales has adopted me because my work is all about Wales as a place.”
Photography is an ideal medium for reflecting what he sees back to those who have known these places for generations.
“I think people respond to the photographs in a visceral way that is quite different to how they respond to a painting,” he says. “People will say things like, ‘My granddad worked there.’ Photographs present something they recognise; it’s about nostalgia, and identification with these places.”
The Allure of Ruins is on show at TEN until May 25.