Art and memory collide for powerful Miners' Strike exhibition
Leading artist and writer's joint effort to explore county after the upheaval of the Miners’ Strike through paintings and sound. Tony Henderson reports
An artist has created 40 paintings during the 40th anniversary year of the 1984/5 Miners’ Strike depicting the County Durham landscape in the wake of the bitter dispute.
Award-winning artist Dr Narbi Price has joined writer Mark Hudson to stage a major new exhibition exploring the county’s post-strike landscapes and communities.
Opening on June 13 at The Warehouse in Newgate Centre, Bishop Auckland, GOING BACK BROCKENS: Monuments and Rhetoric After the Miners’ Strike, will feature the paintings and an accompanying sound installation.
Narbi Price’s new paintings portray former colliery sites as they stand today - silent spaces once central to working-class life, now reclaimed, repurposed, or left behind.
The works are paired with a sound installation by Mark Hudson that revisits interviews from his book Coming Back Brockens (1994), which captured the voices of those who lived through the strike.
The combination of paintings and sound explores not only what was lost, but what remains, what has changed, and how people continue to define their places and memories decades after the last coal was mined.
Painter, curator and lecturer Narbi Price studied at Northumbria and Newcastle universities and holds a PhD which explored the legacy of the Ashington Group of artists (popularly known as the Pitmen Painters.
He said: “I find it really interesting that we have generations of people living in places that are entirely shaped by mining, but might have no living memory of it themselves.
“These former pit villages, and the people that live in them, have tales to tell - not just stories of their industrial past, but new stories of the now, and of hope, progress and evolution.
“The landscapes themselves also tell stories, and when I was choosing which sites to feature in my paintings I revisited Mark’s fantastic book.
“His incredible archive of interviews recorded after the Miners’ Strike has never been heard before. They have a very powerful dialogue with the paintings which really brings people’s stories to life.”
Writer, journalist and critic Mark Hudson said: “The 86 hours of interviews I did in Horden 30 years ago were largely concerned with the Miners’ Strike, which was then very recent.
“In between the strike and me arriving in the village, the pit had closed. The pit was the purpose of Horden, and everything revolved around it – including my father’s family.
“A lot of Narbi’s paintings are about places that became monuments of a disappearing culture. Combined with the spoken word, you develop this powerful rhetoric.”
All 40 paintings and the sound installation will be on display at The Warehouse, a new grassroots arts space being developed by MINE Collective using vacant units at the Newgate Shopping Centre.
On Saturday July 12, the exhibition will form part of the 139th Durham Miners’ Gala, displayed on the field at the historic gathering in Durham City, along with Mark Hudson’s installation.
The exhibition will also be on show at Horden’s 125th anniversary celebrations on Friday August 22 in the historic St Mary’s Church, also known as ‘The Miners’ Cathedral’.
Complementing the show will be a special exhibition by the Horden Hooked on Craft group, responding to the project themes.
Accompanying the GOING BACK BROCKENS exhibition is a collection of six short films by filmmaker Carl Joyce.
Where We Belong is a new documentary film series that explores the relationship between people and place in County Durham. Inspired by Mark Hudson’s book each film will tell the stories of the people of the County Durham villages.
The project has also invited people to share their stories about place through pictures, videos and words contributing to an ongoing community archive, which can be seen alongside the exhibition at The Warehouse.
GOING BACK BROCKENS: Monuments and Rhetoric After the Miners’ Strike at The Newgate Centre in Bishop Auckland will open on Friday June 13 between 5pm-9pm and will then be available to view from 12pm-3pm every Thursday, Friday and Saturday until Saturday July 5.
The exhibition was commissioned by No More Nowt, one of 38 Creative People and Places projects, supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. The project is produced by Building Culture CIC - a County Durham based organisation that produces work that is deeply rooted in place.