FORTY years after the Miners’ Strike a major exhibition is exploring the changing landscapes of post industrial areas of the north east.
And before it arrives in Sunderland, three new paintings have been added to Going Back Brockens: Monuments and Rhetoric After the Miners’ Strike, an exhibition sharing stories of hope and aspiration in mining communities four decades after the 1984/85 Miners’ Strike.
Award-winning artist Narbi Price and acclaimed writer Mark Hudson have combined to create the exhibition and Narbi has created three Wearside-specific paintings for the exhibition’s first showing in a museum gallery setting – at Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens (SMWG), between Friday, September 12, and Saturday, January 3 next year.
The show has been on display in locations throughout County Durham, including Bishop Auckland, Horden and the Durham Miners’ Gala.
The exhibition features paintings by Narbi and a soundscape from Mark. Narbi produced 40 paintings for the exhibition as it toured County Durham.
Narbi’s paintings depict former colliery sites as they are today, whether they have been reclaimed, repurposed or forgotten. The paintings are paired with Mark’s immersive sound installation that revisits interviews from his 1994 book Coming Back Brockens. For the book, Mark spent a year in Horden, listening to tales of the hardships and traditions of miners’ lives, and the struggles and triumphs of trade unionism.
Hartlepool-born Narbri explained: “The combination of paintings and sound explores not only what was lost, but what remains and what has changed.
“For the original exhibition I visited 13 collieries across County Durham that were still open when the strike started in 1984, I added three more for the SMWG show – Monkwearmouth, New Herrington and Westoe.
“Obviously all the collieries have gone, but in some ways the industrial landscapes remain. The infrastructure of shops, social clubs, parks and pubs are still there, but these places are now focused on something that is not there.
“Many of the colliery sites have been built over – such as Westoe – others have been left to nothing or rewilded, so there’s very little of a footprint for some of the former pit sites.
“What I didn’t want to do is ‘poverty porn’ so many of my paintings – Seaham and Dawdon for instance – feature the sea. I deliberately haven’t featured people in the paintings. Once you start adding people to paintings, they become the focus and the protagonist.
“Mark had the tapes of the interviews he’d done for the book, so this was an incredible archive and too good an opportunity to miss. I’d read Mark’s book three times and his warts and all, matter of fact approach to stories of working life just chimed with me. For the exhibition, Mark has created an evocative soundscape – the everyday poetry of speech patterns – which seems to dovetail with my paintings.
“The collaboration was enjoyable, but it was also a huge learning curve for both of us. Mark actually did an art degree and is chief art critic at The Independent so is a respected writer and journalist. His grandfather and great-grandfather were Horden miners so he has a real connection to the region.”
The phrase Going Back Brockens is a pitmatic term describing a technique used to close a coal seam, by pulling out the struts keeping up the roof of a seam.
The exhibition also features Where We Belong, a series of six short films by Carl Joyce inspired by Mark’s evocative book. The documentary films explore the relationship between people and place in County Durham, with each film telling the stories of individuals who continue to shape the County Durham pit villages.
Going Back Brockens was originally commissioned by No More Nowt, the Creative People and Places programme for County Durham supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and produced by Building Culture CIC. The SMWG exhibition has also been supported by Sunderland Culture.