GOING BACK BROCKENS: Monuments and Rhetoric After the Miners’ Strike

27 Aug

2024

Artist Narbi Price and writer Mark Hudson explore themes surrounding the 1984 miners strike and its legacy in County Durham 40 years on. Horden, a village on the east coast of Durham, is where the story begins. Once thriving as Europe’s most productive pit, now considered a ‘left behind’ neighbourhood.

Places like Horden were drastically different following the collapse of industry, hollowed of their identities, but despite such radical shifts they persevered and fought through. These places have stories to tell - stories of heritage but also new stories of hope and aspiration.

Narbi Price and Mark Hudson tell stories through their work; Narbi Price through his paintings and Mark Hudson through his writing and field recordings.

The Project

‘Going Back Brockens: Monuments and Rhetoric After the Miners’ Strike’ is being produced by Building Culture CIC who are collaborating with the artists to showcase the work in County Durham communities and working closely with local community groups to develop meaningful connections with the project.

Narbi Price is creating a new body of work, a series of paintings which consider locations in County Durham as they are now, forty years after the strikes, and the beginning of the end of the area’s defining industry.

Mark Hudson’s accompanying sound installations revisit his interviews which informed his book 'Coming Back Brockens: A Year in a Mining Village'. Made-up of excerpts from interviews with the people of Horden carried out in 1991-92, the majority concerning the Miners’ Strike of 1984-5, which was then still raw in the collective memory - Did you talk to Mark for the book in the 90s? You can help this project. Info at the bottom of this page.

Narbi and Mark are working together to create exhibitions of paintings accompanied by sound, and these will be presented at various locations around the county. Exactly where and how is being developed with the communities of Co. Durham as the project progresses.

“I think there’s something about how I approach painting as a vehicle for narrative. I’m somewhere between a landscape painter and a history painter. There are no people because paintings with people in become about the people depicted.

I want there to be space for the viewer to inhabit the depicted location. I’m interested in the sites being specific yet generic, analogous to the specific but shared and common problems faced by the individuals, families and communities in 1984/5.

My paintings are ultimately about time, each painting deals with time in an extended manner, particular to the medium, different entirely to photography. A painting is a literal record of the time made to make it. Time is encoded into the making.”

— Narbi Price

Recce’s around Co. Durham including Horden, Easington, Bear Park, Gurney Valley and Dene Valley.