Time Travellers of Ferryhill
The paintings and drawings here are from an art project I started in March 2020 with Durham County Council. The council's housing regeneration team are renovating 100-year old miners' terraced houses in Dean Bank, Ferryhill which involves putting ugly steel blanks in doorways and windows during the 2-year project. I was commissioned to make drawings and paintings of the local scene referencing the work of nationally famous local artist and miner Norman Cornish, whose 100th centenary was celebrated in 2019-20. Details from these were enlarged to fit onto some of the door and window blanks to create an outdoor exhibition. The three large paintings created follow a journey Cornish used to make on foot from his home in Spennymoor to his place of work the Dean and Chapter Colliery at Ferryhill immediately below the Dean Bank estate. The landscape has utterly changed since Cornish and his fellow miners trod the muddy path to work: the mine was demolished in the 1960s and replaced by generic warehouses; the pit heap was levelled and the path covered over and planted with trees; the terraced streets of Spennymoor are now clogged with shiny parked cars and adorned with satellite dishes and aerials. My paintings, which are based on extensive research of both the landscape and the drawings and paintings of Norman Cornish, place the viewer in the present day landscape but, through reference to some of Cornish's iconic images, they collapse time and bring fragments of the past into the present. In one painting the housing regeneration project manager is seen striding along up Pit Bank towards Dean Bank with one of Cornish's grey coated flat capped miners. In another painting the Dean and Chapter Colliery emerges like a phantom from the modern trading estate whilst two of Cornish's miners stride along a non-existent path in the present day woodland plantation, a busy colliery shunting yard in Cornish's time. In a third painting, 'The Enigma of Edward Street', a modern day occupant looks across a car-crowded street at one of Cornish's horse-and-cart's with two little children riding on the back. The occupant has one of Cornish's beautiful whippets on a lead. So much has changed but some things are still familiar.