“I was thinking about the poem Ozymandias where there’s a statue looking out on a wasteland. Once upon a time it was a godlike Pharoah figure looking out on a civilisation but now it’s just a desert.
“There’s quite a few statues up the valleys of coal and iron magnates and they’re now looking out on nothing or an industrial estate. What was their works or coal mine is gone and it’s been replaced by just a load of sheds in some places.”
A number of Welsh industrialists were at one time some of the richest people in the world, although little remains of their domain now, and he wonders if a similar fate awaits today’s financial giants.
“To think of the way these spaces were managed, way those spaces were managed and the riches they created, did that ever feed back into Wales as a society and again that’s a story for today.
“People working in Port Talbot are on good wages, but all the money that site must have made in the past or could still make maybe with government ownership, it’s where do the profits go, and that’s the subtext to the project really.
“Aesthetically it’s about these spaces but the subtext is what can we learn for the future.”