'Guardian' is the largest mining memorial in Wales, which commemorates the 1960 Six Bells mining disaster in which 45 men and boys lost their lives in an underground gas and coal dust explosion.
Working in partnership, Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council and Six Bells Communities, First secured funding for a new, more fitting memorial to those who had given so much to the coal mining industry.
On June 28th 2010, (the 50th anniversary of the mining disaster,) the memorial was unveiled at a commemorative service led by the Arch Bishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams and attended by thousands of people including around 400 relatives of the victims who came from all over the UK. and across the world.
Guardian is inscribed with the names, nicknames and home towns of each of the 45 victims, the names have been laser cut into a steel band that is wrapped around the plinth on which Guardian stands.
The figure is the creation of artist Sebastien Boyesen, who said he had found the experience of designing and constructing Guardian over the past 18 months "inspiring and moving".
When he first received the brief, Boyesen was worried about how he could create a fitting memorial to an accident that devastated a whole community. "But when I saw the site, a big open space, it came quickly," he said. "I felt I wanted to do something big — the scale was important. And I wanted a figure, something that represented the men and boys who had lost their lives."
Boyesen, who worked through the night to put the finishing touches to the figure, said he and other contributors to the project did a lot of community consultation, setting up a table in the centre of Abertillery and asking people what they wanted of the memorial.
"We had people in tears talking about it, talking about their loved ones who had died — their fathers, uncles, brothers. It was very moving. It was as if you were talking to survivors from a war. I realised we were doing something that had much more resonance with the people. So often, public art is decorative; this is more than that."
The statue weighs around 8 tones, and costing over £200,000 the memorial statue of a miner, stands 20 meters high, constructed from over 20,000 individual slices of 10mm thick Cor- Ten- steel, a ‘weathering’ steel that allows a protective rust patina to form on its surface.
Guardian now towers over 20 meters above the former Six Bells colliery site; scene of the tragedy some fifty years earlier.
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Sources :-http://www.blaenau-gwent.gov.uk/15510.asp
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