Swindon’s Wyvern Theatre opened in 1971. The building was designed by Hugh Casson, who was highly regarded for his work in civic architecture and would later become the president of the Royal Academy. In the 1980s, Casson was derided for his perceived lack of originality and his establishment leanings but at the time of the Wyvern opening he was still committed to creating exciting buildings in the modernist style.
Casson discovered Joyce Conwy-Evans (b. 1929) at the Bromley College of Art and offered her a spot on the Royal College of Art design course. It was the beginning of a professional relationship that would last for decades and would include work on the interior of the Royal Albert Hall, set and costume designs for Glyndebourne, and tapestries for King’s College Cambridge.
Conwy-Evans’ pen and ink wash designs conveyed the dynamism of a theatre performance. The sharp, angular lines betray her debt to modernism – something that was less obvious in her textile art – and capture the distinctive lighting and ambience of the auditorium. Her designs were the perfect fit for a new, vibrant theatre in a town emerging from years of post-war austerity. At the time, the area between Regent Street and Princes Street was earmarked for major regeneration, but plans for a new civic hall and library stalled. The library was finally built in 2008, while the civic hall never came to fruition, and the area around Theatre Square remains a monument to the difficulties of large-scale town planning.
Conwy-Evans would go on to work on numerous further projects. In 1975 she parted company with Casson and set up her own practice in Chelsea, creating textile pieces in an otherworldly, timeless style, influenced as much by ecclesiastical medieval art as by modernism. Conwy-Evans is now in her nineties. She sold her studio in 2023 but continues to live and work in London, in a flat brimming with artefacts of her own creation and objects she has acquired and put to better use over the years: mirrors and paintings from her grandmother’s attic and an ancestor’s waistcoat from the 1780s rub shoulders with embroidered heraldic lions and the sketches she made while working on projects for Glyndebourne and Charterhouse. Joyce Conwy-Evans may not be a household name, but she has quietly built a unique and underappreciated body of work, much of which can still be seen in educational institutions, churches and municipal buildings the length and breadth of the country.
By Thomas Blake, Visitor Experience Assistant
'Out on the Town' is on until 18 October 2025.
(Image: Copyright Joyce Conwy-Evans)
