Project
Going Back Brockens:
Monuments and Rhetoric After the Miners’ Strike
County Durham
2024 – ongoing
*Producing
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 which informed his book ‘Coming Back Brockens: A Year in a Mining Village’ (1994).
‘Going Back Brockens: Monuments and Rhetoric After the Miners’ Strike’ is commissioned by No more Nowt and being produced by Building Culture. We are collaborating with the artists to showcase the work in County Durham communities and working closely with local groups to develop meaningful connections with the project.
Learn more and follow the development of this project here:
Can you help?
Are you familiar with Mark Hudson’s book ‘Coming Back Brockens: A Year in a Mining Village’?
Were you (or anyone you know) involved at the time?
>> Please email Carlo at Building Culture here
“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
