INTERVIEW: Going Back Brockens

Image: (L-R) Narbi Price and Mark Hudson in front of St Mary’s church in Horden, one of the venues hosting part of the exhibition

“Any kind of making work about a particular region is inherently political. And I want to avoid rustic porn or poverty porn. There’s a lot of rural landscape, a lot of sea, a lot of sky. There’s an element of it being… what it is.”

When tackling a project as momentous as Going Back Brockens, there could be no-one better than award winning artist and lecturer, Narbi Price. This major multi-site exhibition sees Narbi capturing post-strike landscapes of County Durham in 40 new paintings, marking 40 years since the end of the miners’ strikes.

Woven into the exhibition is an immersive soundscape curated by Mark Hudson, a celebrated writer, journalist and author of Coming Back Brockens (1994), in which Mark interviewed folks who had lived through the strikes. Narbi cited this as the seeds of inspiration for the exhibition. “The thing that really chimed with me was that it was an unpolished view of working-class experience that resonated with my own upbringing.”

It soon became evident that the two needed to join forces. “It turned out that Mark has this incredible archive of raw material that has never been heard by anyone apart from him,” notes Narbi. “There’s some quite electrifying stuff and it needs to have some further life.” Mark adds.

The art is unparalleled; Narbi’s eye for capturing such detailed scenery in paint is extraordinary. On creating the 40 new paintings, Narbi explained: “I wanted to do something that could be remotely representative of that range of different types of landscape. I find myself deliberately choosing things I might find challenging to paint.” He continued with a fascinating observation. “The layout of the towns and villages is shaped by mining. There’s a rhythm to the streets that services a pit. The whole landscape is hunkered around a void. That changes how people move through space and that’s something that we all react to, whether we do it so consciously or not.”

It’s as simple as sound and image, but it’s also incredibly nuanced and emotive to have those two things together.

This is exactly why the work is so pertinent; it’s these landscapes that still shape the lives of the folks living there, which is important to honour. “We’re living in a time when there’s been a massive discussion about monuments. Why can’t we celebrate the people of Horden?” Mark added, offering an interesting revelation. “The manners of speech that emerged from that time are still around, and that in a way is monumental. It’s part of the living past that’s still going on. Things that deserve to be preserved, or treasured, even though they don’t exist in physical objects. It should be applied even notionally to the spoken rhetoric of East Durham.”

This superb pair have created something truly special; an evocative, honest and genuine representation of working-class experience and landscapes; not glittered up or rose tinted. Going Back Brockens provides a chance for people to hear echoes of the past, whilst exploring what it means to still exist in these spaces today. Narbi summarised: “It’s as simple as sound and image, but it’s also incredibly nuanced and emotive to have those two things together.”

Going Back Brockens opens on Friday 13th June at The Warehouse in Newgate Centre, Bishop Auckland, and will then be open from 12pm-3pm every Thursday, Friday and Saturday until Saturday 5th July. It will also feature at the 139^th Durham Miners’ Gala on Saturday 12th July and at Horden’s 125th anniversary celebrations on Friday 22 August.

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