“Thank you for this.
No sensationalising of the strike – just a simple focus on the people who lost so much and are trying to rebuild.”
– Visitor feedback
“The paintings, spoken words and films work in your imagination like a ghostly play, weaving themes of brokenness and partial healing across time and place.“
– Mike Quille, The Morning Star
★★★★★
“It is a moving, imaginative symphony, as tender and truthful a piece of community-based art as has ever been made about coalfield communities.”
– Mike Quille, The Morning Star
“The sound installation […] has an understated presence, acting as an ambient score marked by tone, accent and the age of the recordings. Phrases come in and out of focus, sometimes with gut-punch clarity as with the words ‘four hours and twenty minutes…I thought I was going to die…’“
– Kate Liston, Corridor8
“Thank you for this.
No sensationalising of the strike – just a simple focus on the people who lost so much and are trying to rebuild.”
– Visitor feedback
Going Back Brockens:
Monuments and Rhetoric After the Miners’ Strike
County Durham
2024 – ongoing
*Producing
Produced by Building Culture, GOING BACK BROCKENS is a major art project , initially commissioned by No More Nowt and now a touring exhibition.
An ambitious approach saw award winning painter Narbi Price making 40 new paintings during the 40th anniversary of the miners strike and collaborating with acclaimed writer Mark Hudson to include a soundscape of voices made up of interviews from the Durham coalfield in 1992-92.
Building Culture worked with the artist and the commissioners to develop a county wide approach to not only show the work, but embed it within the communities it references.
Working on the ground over a 20 month period and including a new commission to complement the core show, the project culminated in a three part showcase across the county, presented in unconventional spaces and shaped by local partners in each place.
We focused on crossing over existing scenes, merging audiences, and ultimately shifting collective baselines. The result was a high-impact presentation of an incredibly powerful body of work, experienced by people in their own place.
Following a successful run of events in Bishop Auckland, Durham Miners Gala and Horden, the exhibition moved to Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens, marking the first showing of the work in a dedicated public gallery.
GOING BACK BROCKENS: Monuments and Rhetoric After the Miners’ Strike was originally 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.
Produced by Building Culture CIC.
“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.”
— Narbi Price
Currently showing
Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens
12 Sept – 3 Jan
>> More info
* Previous showings
Friday June 13 – Saturday July 5
The Warehouse, Bishop Auckland
Saturday July 12
Durham Miners’ Gala
Friday August 22 – Sunday August 31
St. Mary’s Church, Horden
All exhibitions are free to attend.
>> For more info on the original project, view the No More Nowt website here
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About the exhibition
Artist Narbi Price and writer Mark Hudson present GOING BACK BROCKENS: Monuments and Rhetoric After the Miners’ Strike, an exhibition that re-examines the landscapes and memories left in the wake of Britain’s heavy industries.
During the 40th anniversary year of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, Narbi Price created 40 new paintings depicting former colliery landscapes as they stand today – silent spaces once central to life, now reclaimed, repurposed, or left behind. Price’s approach, blending contemporary landscape and history painting, invites viewers to engage with these sites as records of time and collective memory.
Accompanying the paintings is an immersive soundscape by Mark Hudson which revisits interviews from his book Coming Back Brockens (1994). Recorded in 1991-92, these archival interview tapes are exhibited publicly for the first time through this project, giving new life to the raw and emotive voices of those who lived through the strike.
Price’s paintings, alongside Hudson’s soundscape, capture the echoes of history, while prompting the perspectives of those who live in the communities now. This exhibition is not only about 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.
I’m somewhere between a landscape painter and a history painter. My paintings are ultimately about time, each painting deals with time in an extended manner, different entirely to photography. A painting is a literal record of the time made to make it. Time is encoded into the making.
These were raw, personal, and unforgettable conversations, to bring them back is incredibly emotional. I never expected to hear them again. They gave me deeply personal accounts of what they went through, and it’s incredibly moving to hear them now, 30 years later.
Where We Belong
Where We Belong is a series of newly commissioned short films by County Durham filmmaker Carl Joyce.
Inspired by Mark Hudson’s evocative book Coming Back Brockens, each film explores the relationship between people and place, telling new and unique stories of the people who live in County Durham villages and the ways in which they continue to shape, and be shaped by, the place they call home.
Commissioned as part of the wider engagement work connected to the project, the series seeks new and alternative voices to complement those featured in GOING BACK BROCKENS: Monuments and Rhetoric After the Miners’ Strike.
Reviews
Corridor8: Exhibition review
Click here
The Morning Star: Exhibition review
Click here
North East Bylines: Exhibition review
Click here
Culture Matters: Extended review
Click here
“In Going Back Brockens, different elements of the story are allowed space to interact and for new meanings and effects to emerge – significantly, with the communities that shape it at the centre.”
– Kate Liston, Corridoor8
BBC Radio Tees interview:
Narc. Magazine interview
Mack Sproates interviews Narbi Price and Mark Hudson
GOING BACK BROCKENS: Monuments and Rhetoric After the Miners’ Strike was originally 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.
Produced by Building Culture CIC.