In selecting Cardiff and making a sculpture that would memorialize the city’s coal mining past, Evans attempted to negotiate the gap between his own working class background and the exclusive London art scene into which he had gained entry through the force of his talent. Throughout his career, Evans has created sculptures and graphic works that can be variously beautiful, stark, harmonious and confrontational. But he was stunned by Cardiff’s response, which ranged from bafflement to outright hostility—all faithfully recorded in a now-legendary audio compilation.

This film tells the extraordinary saga of a work of public art that was created for a particular site, rejected by that community, removed, and lost to the world for almost 50 years. Then, through extraordinary fortune, it was located, restored, and returned to the city of Cardiff, with funding by a city-wide Art Fund campaign.

The 1970s in Great Britain was a time of social tumult but also a period of tremendous creative expression. The term “socially engaged art practice” was not yet part of art dialogue when Garth Evans created the Cardiff sculpture. As he ventured into public art for the first time, he found that the roles artists play in society (including oracle, provocateur and unifier) each come with serious contradictions and tensions. With humor and unflinching honesty, the film explores deep themes of politics and class, aesthetics, community and memory – all refracted through a piece of steel that came to embody the ire and yearning of an entire city.