Series of bronze sculptures
2025
The series depicts vulcanizers at work, elevating skilled, essential labor often overlooked in urban life. The sculptures act as quiet counter-monuments, honoring work that keeps cities moving.
Labour of Love presents a series of bronze sculptures depicting vulcanizers at work—men bent over tires, wielding tools, engaged in the physical acts of repair and maintenance that define their trade. Through these works, Dela Anyah captures the material reality of informal labor, rendering visible the skilled movements and sustained effort that typically go unacknowledged within urban economies.
By translating these working figures into bronze—a material historically reserved for commemorating military heroes, political leaders, and mythological figures—Anyah performs a radical act of aesthetic and social reclamation. The series challenges entrenched hierarchies within art history by asserting the vulcanizer’s workspace as a legitimate site of technical skill, economic contribution, and cultural significance. Where bronze has traditionally conferred permanence upon power, here it immortalizes labor that is precarious yet indispensable, overlooked yet foundational to the infrastructure of daily life.
Labour of Love functions as documentation and redefinition—an acknowledgment of work as productive force within contemporary urban economies and a counter-monument that insists these men and their labor deserve recognition. In casting these figures, Anyah does not sentimentalize informality but rather demands visibility for the craft, physical knowledge, and economic reality embedded in work that keeps communities functioning. The series asks: who deserves to be memorialized, and what forms of labor constitute the true foundations of our cities?