Projects

Maisie Ridgway, 'Coal Archives: Boredom, Extractivism and the Regenerative Potentials of Mining Imaginaries in North West Leicestershire'

Funded by The University of Leicester in partnership with The Leverhulme Trust

Coal Archives combines oral history, life writing, and cultural geography in a collection of creative non-fiction essays that explore the intersecting themes of place-based affects, extractivism, inscription (of landscape and page) and community. The project is underpinned by an interest in the situated boredom I felt as a teenager growing up in Ibstock, a post-industrial commuter village in North West Leicestershire. Boredom can make us feel as if the world has withdrawn, it is a flattening or a deadening that prevents us from engaging meaningfully with our surroundings. Across the collection, I enter my flattened Ibstock into dialogue with the Ibstock of local coal miners, whose oral historical accounts conversely depict a village of physical and imaginative depth. The project is, then, an experiment in counteracting the disaffection of place through the regenerative potentials of intergenerational storytelling and creative practice, the broader aims of which are to foster an intimacy with post-industrial spaces and establish them as sites worthy of sustained artistic engagement.

image: 'Pit Props' (1992) by Constance Stubbs. © the artist's estate. Image credit: National Coal Mining Museum for England