February 2026 Fellows' update: Siân Evans

Siân Evans (CF 2011) recently graduated from the University of Sheffield with a PhD in archaeology. Her multidisciplinary research focused on female-made metal artefacts from the Imperial War Museum - and asked how gender provenance is understood in archaeometallurgy and how the culture of metalworking skills is curated and transmitted.

This was informed by her own ongoing experience as a coppersmith which began in a forge apprenticeship in 1991. Siân’s academic work is in many ways a natural extension of the research she undertook as part of her 2011 Churchill Fellowship, when she travelled to France, Greece and India to discover the origins of coppersmithing.

Since 2019, when Siân represented the country at UNESCO’s International Festival of Handcrafters in Uzbekistan, she has become interested in the notion of living heritage, which includes her own practice of coppersmithing (now listed on the Red List of Endangered Crafts). She is plans to bring her practical knowledge of smithing and academic credentials together in a way which can benefit current thinking about safeguarding intangible cultural heritage.