Michael Edmonds - The Cross over the City

Michael Edmonds superimposes an upright cross, with a strong black horizontal, upon an array of 130 rectangular red blocks. The upright of the cross is made from a combination of a thin black strip at the top, narrow white border strips at the bottom with two rows of white and coloured mosaic squares. From a distance, it looks like an aerial photograph of traffic on a major road crossing a road or railway cutting, both passing through a rigidly uniform estate of urban housing blocks. The reflective gold, black, red, green, yellow and blue mosaic tesserae together with some areas of ‘gold-dust’ speckled on a dark surface at the top, give a precious feeling of sparkling richness to the relief.

Born: Dorset, UK, 1926

Died: Montgomery, Powys, UK, 2014

Early Life and education

Michael Edmonds was born in Dorset and educated in Somerset. He is known as an artist and architect who lived much of his life in Wales.

As a young man he served as a ‘Bevin Boy’ in the coal mines of south Wales from 1944-47, as part of the war effort to increase coal production. During this time, he studied part-time at Cardiff School of Art. He qualified as an architect in 1953 having studied at the Royal West of England Academy School of Architecture.

Life and career

He began exhibiting in group exhibitions in 1943, his first being the ‘Children and the war’ exhibition in the Cooling Galleries, London. He was active in Wales where he had settled, marrying in 1951 and moving to Penarth, working as an architect for the National Coal Board in Cardiff. His first one-man show was at Drian Gallery, London in 1962, the year that the Methodist Modern Art Collection was formed. In 1956 along with Eric Malthouse and David Tinker he formed the 56 Group (later renamed 56 Group Wales), an influential exhibiting group of contemporary professional artists living and working in Wales. Edmonds also joined the Society of Christian Artists. He later worked as an architect in London before retiring back to Wales living in Mongomery, Powys.

In the 1960s and early 1970s he produced a number of constructions and sculptures using mixed media including fibreglass and cast aluminium. These artworks drew on the Russian and European constructivist traditions which included artists such as Malevich and Mondrian. The structural nature of the works seems to be related to his architectural work. Living in Penarth his work came to the notice of the Revd Douglas Wollen who purchased Cross over the City (1962) in 1963 for the Methodist Modern Art Collection.

Edmonds worked in the Architecture department of the Greater London Council (GLC) until 1980 after which he painted full-time, producing landscapes which shifted from an abstracted style to a freer, looser atmospheric style. During this period, he also returned to religious and mythological subjects which he described as archetypes of “oneness with nature”. He commented that he has never seen religion and science as opposed. He described himself as a “convinced Christian but not exclusive” and much indebted to Eastern quietude.

In retirement he worked in watercolour and was a member of the Watercolour Society of Wales. Crucifixion, an example of his late style, was presented to the Methodist Modern Art Collection by his family on his death.

His memoir, War Underground, was published in 2013 by the South Wales Record Society having originally been written in the 1940s, recounting his time as a ‘Bevin Boy’.

Edmonds had work commissioned by the National Union of Mineworkers and the Medical Research Council. He also had commissions from the Methodist Church including fonts (1963) for Wesley’s Chapel and the Methodist Missionary Society Chapel (both in London); a contemplative cross/mandala now in Trinity Methodist Church, Penarth (1995); and an external mural for Bramhall Lane Methodist Church, Stockport (early 1970s).

His work can be found in the collections of the Contemporary Art Society; British Coal; Welsh Schools Collection; the National Museum of Wales; Pembroke College, Oxford; and the University of South Wales.

David Buckman, Artists in Britain Since 1945: Volume 1 A to L, Vol. 1 of 2 volumes, (Bristol: Art Dictionaries Ltd, 2006), p. 462.

Seeing the Spiritual: A Guide to the Methodist Modern Art Collection, (Oxford: The Methodist Modern Art Collection, 2018), p. 40-41.

Roger Wollen, Catalogue of the Methodist Church Collection of Modern Christian Art with an Account of the Collection’s History, (Oxford: The Trustees of the Methodist Collection of Modern Christian Art, 2003), p. 65-68.

56 Group Wales website: 56groupwales.org.uk/aboutus

Michael Edmonds, War Underground: Memoirs of a Bevin Boy in the South Wales Coalfield, Edited by Peter Wakelin, (South Wales Record Society, 2013).