The Face of Coal Lecture

The Face of Coal Lecture
Creativity within the Mining Institute
Wednesday 1st October
( all images and poetry referred to throughout this piece have appeared within this blog in the past)
The aim of this lecture is to explore my residency within the Mining Institute.
I hope to foster an understanding of the creative process and explore the pieces of work I have created within the last 5 months of being in residence.
I’d like to compare the creative process to Mining, if you will allow me. I do not mean any disrespect here, and I am not saying that creativity is as hard and/or as dangerous as mining. No I am simply using this comparison to illustrate a point. Please bear with me.
A miner goes to work each day underground in a mine. The product he brings out each day is coal, maybe a bucket, maybe a truck but it is always coal. There is the expectation that coal is the production of his work. Day in day out, the miner goes to the face, works the seam to bring out the coal. It is expected. This coal is brought to the surface and then distributed to customers who will in turn use it to produce other products. The coal is a fuel for revenue and for other production.
An artist’s job is similar to this work of the miner, in the sense that the artist goes to work and she will mine her ideas, thoughts, feelings and memories to create a product. If the expectations are there to bring out a certain product day in day out then that is what will happen. This product can be likened to a bucket of coal. If you go to work expecting to produce a bucket of coal every time you work, you will produce that bucket of coal. A product that can go on be sold and fuel others.
But if the artist is being honest, truthful to and trusting in the creative process, then when she goes to work, when she goes to the face, which can be a desk, a computer, an easel, she is not really sure what she will create. She’ll not really know if she’ll being out a bucket of coal or a bucket of diamonds. She’s not sure what she will create. A bucket of coal or a bucket of diamonds, neither one is better than the other they are just different. Art is created and if the artist has faith in the process and herself, she can create a piece of art, something different every time. Something unexpected.
As Julia Cameron, the author of The Artist’s Way, has said, 'We cast our dreams and desires ahead of us, and as we move towards them, their content takes on solidity. We co-create our lives. This is both our responsibility and our privilege. A symphony moves both through and ahead of a composer. As he moves towards it, it moves towards him. In a sense, as artists, we both pitch a ball of creative energy and catch it.'
The Face of Coal started out from a continuation of my Writer’s in Residence position in the Lit and Phil. In there, I was exploring the North East’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. Something that came up in this research was the secondary involvement of coal in this trade. Coals to London could have been fuelling the ships going out to West Africa to capture people to enslave. The coals from the North East could have been used in the ships that brought raw goods from the Caribbean to the Western markets. I was interested in these links. This interest expanded to explore the representation of women, children and black and ethnic minorities within the mining industry itself.
Through the help of volunteers we have unearth new evidence, new resources that will be added to the Institute’s catalogue for future research and will be available as part of educational resources for the future generations. These findings can be pinned down and documented.
This is not the creative part, the creative part of this project comes from me, comes from a commitment to the creative process. Comes from me and my interests, come from a gut reaction, a thought, a feeling, an idea sparked by some kind of fuel. This in turn fuels the process, then this process fuels the process and so on.
Coal is fuel and is used to create other things, as I’ve mentioned before. In order to have creative energy that triggers a creative response, an artist needs fuel.
I want to explore the fuel I’ve used to create a number of works of art, both text and images, that will form a showcase, and a poetry collection in January 2009. I’d like to see these as both buckets of coal and buckets of diamonds. Buckets that I hope will ultimately fuel other artists/ people to embrace the creative process.

Initially when I mentioned to a friend that I was embarking on this residency, we started to talk about the feeling of being underground and how once a miner surfaces how his eyes would have to readjust to the light, readjust to the surface colours of the world. This started me thinking about colour and how my ideas of coal and being underground were colourless, a blackness, a darkness. But this isn’t true, in one sense, look at these drawings and charts detailing the layers of sediment under the earth’s crust, underground. A different colour is used to represent different strata, a different rock or mineral. Because really each are a different colour, even black has different shades. These ideas fuelled the creation of a series of abstract paintings titled Yard Seam, in which I explore all the colours that are hidden underground in the dark.
These ideas around colour were further developed with a series of digital collages called Underwater Outcrop.
I’ve always felt an affinity with the sea. When I’m a bit depressed. I get in the car and drive to the sea, it has both a calming and rejuvenating effect on me. So when I read that there were underwater mines, I knew I had to explore this concept. Lynemouth and Ellington were my first port of call. I found out about the layers of rock that were underground at these points and the seams that were mined for each colliery. At the same time as this, I discovered a pastel making factory up in Northumberland, Unison Colour. This factory creates pastels by hand, each of their 200 colours is made from individual pigments. I took a drive to this place and was immersed in colour. It was glorious.
From the photographs I took on my visit to the factory, I used the jars, and imagined that these jars contained colours but these colours came from the different seams of the coastal mines. So this example is Lynemouth, and at Lynemouth colliery they mined a Main Seam as well as a Brass Thill seam etc.
This is a digital collage, where I’ve manipulated images of the jars, superimposed them over a sea background, a sea that was blue but now black to represent the sea of coal that they are mining, under the sea.
Amber Film produced Sea Coal, a film about the travellers who collected coal that washed up on Lynemouth beach from the colliery. They would sell this to make a living.While searching for this film, I also found a series of photographs taken during the miners strike, and also capturing the mining villages before they disappeared, Easington was one example. This image of Willie hit me. I’m not sure who he was, if he was a miner or not but I knew I had to write about him. The mood or feeling I gained from looking at the image was one of sadness. I’m not sure if it was the limp net curtains, Willie’s solemn expression or the empty bird cage.
The Lost State
The project The Lost State is inspired by the demise of coal mining. Which ever way you approach mining; the industry, the community, the history, you have to explore the closure of mines in the North East region. I've produced a series of largely black and brown still life photographs of objects against ambiguous backgrounds as a means of inquiry into the tragedy that is nearly impossible to reconcile. It’s not so much about a mystery of the death of mining more so the controversy that surrounds the dismantling of not just an industry, or the structural fabric of the community but also a way of life , the meaning of life within communities that were created to serve the mines.
The Lost State could be read as a tribute to an industry which is greatly missed and its people who have suffered a loss of confidence and a collective depression. I hope that I transform these objects, every day items of the industry- a hewers hat, a lamp, a gas mask, a clock – into signifiers of loss.
In contrast – the banner the symbolic and representational heart of the village, the community, can still be seen and heard beating.

12 July 2008, I left my bed early this Saturday morning to get to Durham. I went with my husband to the PARK and RIDE, and got into the city before 8.00. The barriers were up along the roads leading to the race course. Not a lot of people yet. A prime time to chose our spot to observe the Durham Gala, or ‘the Big Meeting’.
It's hard for me to find the words to describe what I witnessed that day.
Amazing just isn't enough.
I saw people laughing and enjoying themselves with their families, three or four generations.
I saw young children walking with a rope in their hand, a rope attached to the colliery banner.
I saw pride, solidarity and strength that day.
I went to the Durham Gala not knowing what to expect. What I found there was beyond all my expectations because it is a totally unique affair. Nothing could have prepared me it.
There was the still and quiet before the bands, people manoeuvring into position.
There were the police out in force but part of the day, as they talked and walked with the marchers. There were the bands and banners.
Brass bands and banners which walked down over the bridge and stopped to play to the dignitaries on the balcony of the county hotel. And did they play.
These were young and old musicians together playing with pride, playing for their communities, playing for their history and their futures.
It was so emotional to be there amongst the crowds. The crowds that might be drinking at 10 in the morning but crowds of people who are wearing smiles and carrying a generous spirit.
Tears well up now as I remember what I saw that day, what I heard that day, what I've felt that day. But I wasn't alone. That was the beauty of the day, the sense of togetherness. That sense of hope. The idea that all will be well as long as we stay together, as long as we stand together, as long as we live together. That day gave me back my faith in the humanity.
I've got photographs and video of the day. But they can not portray the true essence of the day, of the occasion. Within these photographs, lie trace memories, faint impressions of the day as a whole. As nothing could present the day and what that day represented for the communities that were present.
Hunting the Wounded

Beige-heeled, she struts
along the soft cushioned carpet of the Houses.
She has no net, she has no arrows,
but plenty of willing hounds and a gun.

With deep-seated breaths she ripples the air.
Crushed it tumbles down
her throat to her stomach
feeding her scorn. There really is no alternative.

With her handbag poised,
she crashes out of the black door.
Flashing light bulbs and provoking questions
can not disturb her iron composure.

She was only a grocer’s daughter
brought up on self-reliance not unity.
In broad day light, she shoots a 15 year old boy.
The rest will come, suffering the same slaughter.

I must say at this point that the people I have worked with and met through this Institute; the members, the committee, the ex-miners, the wives and children, have been very open and generous with their time, thoughts and memories. I’d like to thank them.
Hunting the Wounded, like other poems I have created for the collection, SEAM, out in January, came about from an interview with a committee member, who for a while was the only woman on the board. I find it amazing how many people mining has touched throughout the years and miles, one way or another. And how one woman, really, Maggie Thatcher who wanted to bring down the unions, used that 15 year old boy, the miners to do so.
With The Face of Coal, I suppose I wanted to prove, or show how the mining industry wasn’t a male dominated world as I’d always thought it was. I wanted to research into the women’s/the children’s/ black people’s involvement and contribution within mining.
What I am working on at the moment are a number of ink and pencil drawings that I hope will to pull together, will represent the whole of the industry, the men, women, children, but also the social side, the allotments, the pigeons, the being underground but also the life above ground.
I suppose I should finish now as others usually start. I’ve noticed in the number of events I’ve attended, in relation to mining, how those involved, the speakers usually begin with their connection to mining, either through them working in the industry or a family member doing so. Why they do this I can only really think of one reason and I think it’s to share with the audience, no actually show the audience, who are connected to mining in some way themselves, evidence that s/he is one of them, that they are from the same mining stock. S/he tries to make those connections.

Therefore, I feel I have to continue this tradition myself, and put my credentials on the table.
Thomas Richard Melgram, my mother’s father, did a number of jobs in his life, as you can see here he started off as a boxer, earning the money to feed his 12 siblings.

Later in life, he became a miner. He worked in the Havannah Pit, up near Hazelrigg, Newcastle. That is all I know, if anyone can shed any more light on it please get in contact. I remember though, that he would put on a corset and go out at night. Then come back hours later and peel the corset off, and scratch his back like hell. So this is my personal connection to mining so to speak. I hope this at least lets me into your circle, into your private club as I’ve heard that miners and mining communities are a ‘funny lot’ in fact a different breed.


But no I’ve got another connection. I have been down a mine. Over the summer I got the opportunity, thanks to John Crompton to go down Boulby Potash Mine, in Cleveland.
I know this is different to a coal mine. But I went underground. I didn’t know what to expect, a bucket of coal? A bucket of salt or diamonds?
The trip was much more valuable in terms of fuel. The trip down this modern potash mine fuelled my respect for the miner. It was hard heavy labour dangerous labour that I can not begin to imagine was like. Only a miner knows that experience.

I’d like to finish with a poem I created after my journey underground and later from talking about the experience with others who went down the mine with me.

The Synchronised Cage


When I give the signal
the ritual begins.
Let the cold iron curtain
pull towards you.
Glimpse the world you depart
through diamonded wire mesh.
Tread the space carefully
as you take the strain with your arms.
Steady.
There is movement
into a disorientating darkness.
You can be confident
that my stillness is matching yours.
Open your mouth to the air
thick with small heavy particles.
Rub your tongue across your lips
and taste the salt and something else – fear?
The important thing is to empty your mind
and forget the world above.
Open your lungs
and breath the stagnant black air.
Relax.
With all this practice
our progress is bound to be worthy.
Let the rattling metal soothe you
not jar. As the last fracture of sunlight
disappears allow the dark to invite you.
Eyes wide shut, shooting through the bowels
of this earth, let your tears and fears
roll with mine, in harmony.