carwyn evans | THE DAILY CARDIFF

carwyn evans
peth’na
06|03 – 11|04|26

Carwyn Evans RCA returns to TEN with Peth’na, a meditation on material, memory and the spaces between

TEN presents Peth’na, a new suite of sculptures by Carwyn Evans RCA, running 6 March to 11 April 2026 at The Coach House, R/O 143 Donald Street, Cardiff. Taking its name from a colloquial Welsh placeholder—Peth’na, the word you reach for when the right one won’t come—Evans builds an entire exhibition around the power of the undefined.

These works inhabit the in‑between. Wood, perspex, rubber, found objects and clay unearthed from his family’s land in Ceredigion are assembled into forms that are both “this” and “that,” refusing to settle into a single identity. Their ambiguity becomes a language of its own, speaking to the shifting states of belonging that shape Evans’s life and practice.

Evans has long explored erosion—of place, of culture, of the self. By reducing agricultural and functional materials to their barest essence, he reveals the voids left behind when one moves away from home. The clay from his father’s farm is especially charged: dug up, carried across Wales, and reshaped within the gallery, it mirrors the artist’s own journey from rural Cymru to the capital and onward to London. Each sculpture becomes a vessel for that distance, holding the tension between origin and departure.

Some materials are meticulously worked; others remain raw, bearing the marks of their previous lives. Evans’s careful, almost tender process of selection and reassembly allows these objects to retain their histories even as they become something new. The result is a series of sculptures that feel both grounded and unsettled—quiet, resonant, and deeply human.