Siân Evans

I have a research interest in the metalwork of the early 1900s and a general interest in experimental archaeometallurgy. Arriving into academia from a professional craftsperson’s background invites exciting collaborations and my involvement with the University of Sheffield’s Archaeomaterials Research Group is both stimulating and fruitful. 

I am a proactive member of the Heritage Crafts Association, supporting an agenda to record, protect and foster tacit heritage crafts skills – and I also remain very involved in the work of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. 

I love to share my making skills. I am just as interested in why people make things as I am in how they make them.

Thesis Abstract

The lives and work of women metalworkers throughout history have been under-researched, often because perceptions of this craft seem especially gendered. The reasons why this should be, interest me and other female metalworkers, as our own work clearly illustrates that metallurgy and skills in the forge can be practised by anybody. 

Whilst maintaining a keen interest in metalwork across a wide archaeological timescape, this particular research focuses on female metalworkers of the early 1900s. Using case studies from home front deployment in the First World War, sweated labour industries and a burgeoning Arts and Crafts Movement, I seek to discover how women metalworkers have been affected by the places and spaces they occupied, the materials they used and the objects they made. How did those things in turn affect them?

This research aims to give voice to the women’s experience, examining artefacts, archives, industrial records, films and photographs. It includes verbal accounts from the women themselves, considers existing literature about them and appraises the meaning and significance of both their skills and the objects they made. 

My own experiences over the last thirty years as a professional coppersmith provide a unique insight into how workspaces are created, how different metals are used and how this environment can be negotiated around friendships, relationships and dependants.

Furthermore, my personal responses to the research may include a creative and a practical conversation with the subject matter. In contemplating an object, I may reply by making another.