Mining heritage inspired artist residency

2 January 2025

Blog by artist, Abi Baker

The arts residency with the Land of Lead and Silver project in 2024 offered me the opportunity to set up with the equipment and resources necessary to run workshops independently as a creative facilitator. It has also given me the confidence to continue running workshops, and allowed the time to develop new skills with the lead mining heritage providing inspiration for new areas of creativity.

I learned to create a quilt, including hand-stitching, using a sewing machine, freehand embroidery and sewing in mixed media pieces, such as maps and poetry. I also learned the process of framing my own work. Before the residency I mainly created my pieces using a pottery wheel but during this residency I focused on developing skills in the hand-building discipline of ceramics. The finished pieces have given me confidence and opened up so many options of creating work in new ways.

I have learned so much about the mining heritage and how this has shaped the landscape that I love. I’ve also learned about the geology of the North Pennines and why this was so important for the industrial activities that took place here. This has always been something that has interested me but quite often something I have found difficult to get my head around. Learning about it in a completely different way through a creative practice has given me a new way of understanding the landscape and a deeper way to connect with it.

I have learned more about women’s roles within the farmer/miner communities and the important role they played, farming the land, raising children, and creating necessary household items to support and maintain family and home. I learned that my great great grandmother would create rugs and quilts for the family home in Alston. I honoured this by choosing to create a quilted background of patchwork shades of green to represent the hills in the North Pennines.

I had time to develop my understanding of some of the rare lead-tolerant plants, such as mountain pansies, spring sandwort, pyrenean scurvygrass, sea thrift, and lichens, such as cladonia and peltigera.

The focus of the main final piece, named ‘Land of Lead and Silver’, was the mosaic of calaminarian grassland plants, a community of plants that grow in metal-rich soils. During the workshops, I encouraged everyone to create a mixture of pieces of ceramic flowers and mining infrastructure which were included in the final piece. The piece was a mixed media quilt with a ceramic frame and ceramic pieces illustrating a mixture of social history and the landscape of the North Pennines.

The second piece was ‘A porcelain trilogy’, three porcelain dresses, mounted onto board and calico with wire and thread detail. Often overlooked and underrepresented within mining history, this piece was inspired by the women who were at the heart of these mining communities. Some of their many responsibilities included farming the land, raising children, cooking, baking, making rugs and producing quilts. This piece became a gesture of appreciation for the unsung names of the women who left their mark on the culture of the North Pennines. The fragility of these thin, clean and white porcelain dresses, contrasts with the rugged beauty of the women that they frame. Young girls, farmers and mothers growing up and living in this industrial landscape, now disappearing into our ever-distancing northern heritage, but their spirits live on in the rugs, quilts and ancestry they left behind.

The final pieces were two vases inspired by the geology. Vase one, ‘Fractures, Faults and Fluorspar’, used white stoneware with copper glazes and silver lustre. This vase is inspired by the rich mineral veins of the North Pennines, exploring the major influence of our valuable industrial heritage, the geology. Within the layers upon layers of rock, fractures and faults form before being filled by mineral rich fluids, which cooled leaving the deposits of galena, fluorspar, zinc and other valuable minerals. This vase glows green like fluorspar and shines with silver to honour the beauty of the natural landscape.

Vase two, ‘Layers of the landscape’, made from white stoneware with copper glazes and silver lustre. This piece aims to explore the layers of the North Pennines landscape in an abstract and textural way. Inspired by the tactile experience of running your hand across the rocks, this vase brings together textures and tones of our rugged environment. Varying between textures and terrain, the topography of the lines depict the hilly landscape of the North Pennines.

I ran four community workshops in pottery and lino-printing focussed on the calaminarian grasslands, social history, mining infrastructure and heritage. Each person made a selection of pieces inspired by these topics, using images to inspire discussion amongst the groups. In the lino-printing workshop, there was a mixture of prints created including mine carts, mine entrances, abstract crystals, lead tolerant plants, and the upland wading birds commonly seen and associated with the North Pennines. In the final workshop, ceramic tiles were created in Nenthead, a village built by the London Lead Company. These pieces showed a mixture of mining infrastructure, local mining sites and personal connections to the mining heritage.

Following the workshops, a number of people have bought lino cutting equipment to continue this skill at home and some participants of the pottery workshops now attend a 10-week pottery course. My research has been a point of discussion amongst the creative community I am part of in Teesdale, inspiring conversations about the mining heritage I have explored and leading some people to find out about their personal northern heritage.

I have developed as an artist, finding inspiration in my local heritage, and artistic communities. Going forward as an artist, my main inspirations are changing to focus on the landscape heritage of the area and my personal northern heritage. I am hoping to learn some heritage skills like quilt-making to follow in my great great grandmothers footsteps and have begun to focus on new pottery techniques that will help me to communicate ideas surrounding heritage and the importance in understanding, reconnecting and preserving the heritage of the North Pennines.

Abi Baker’s arts residency with the North Pennines National Landscape was part of the 2024 community arts programme for the Land of Lead and Silver project, funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund and Historic England.

The 2025 community arts bursaries applications will open in January 2025.