Beyond Coal is an art exhibition by East Durham Arts Network members in their seaside gallery at Seaham, County Durham during May. https://www.edanart.co.uk/ The illustrations show artists planning their contributions.
The exhibition is inspired by the Durham Miner’s Association’s adage: “The Past We Inherit the Future We Build”. It explores the significance of green energy as a replacement for fossil fuels. Via engagement with Durham Energy Institute, preparations for the exhibition were sponsored by the GEMS project, whose social scientists probed local people’s understandings and responses to the post-coal era.
Pursuing these questions with EDAN led to conversations about the possibilities and limits of ‘green’ technologies compared to current developments in the former north-east coalfield alongside connections to global concerns about the next generation of energy production. Most particularly, the artists became interested in plans to use mine waste water to heat new housing development, which resulted in visits to a plant at Dawdon where plans are readied to use mine waste water to heat a new housing development. Do such initiatives bring prosperity to East Durham?
Just as mining created particular forms of social, cultural and environmental relations, so the new technologies have implications for how we embrace those legacies. Coal entailed more than mere energy extraction. It produced ways of life and cultural meanings that remain relevant, even if distorted by the loss of the pits. The exhibition considers the significance of this inheritance and suggests that real prosperity – beyond finance and electricity generation alone – involves paying attention to the wider meaning of ‘energy’ as the source of all life, natural as well as constructed.
On June 6 the exhibition will relocate to Washington Arts Centre and there are plans for transferring to Beamish Museum and the possibility of a display at the Beamish shop in Durham’s High Street.
