Durham coal-train track walks

Gorse blooming in January! It isn't usually
out until March-April.

Finally, the wind has stopped blowing and the sun has come out. Mind you, it's still warm for January (see the gorse), so we took a walk on one of the myriad paths following old railway lines criss-crossing the landscape.

All around Newcastle are villages developed around coal mines (remember the phrase "coals to Newcastle"?). These are called "pit villages" from having a coal pit, and to move the coal to market, small coal trains were used. When Maggie Thatcher broke the coal-miners strike in 1984, most of the pits were abandoned, tracks ripped out, and slag heaps landscaped.

It is difficult to imagine what the area, now green and increasingly wooded, looked like those days: with industrial waste scattered across the hills and mine shaft facilities towering over the villages. Today, one can walk for miles on the old rail tracks along river courses, across farmland and through woods on the Deerness Valley Walk, the Lanchester Valley Walk and the Brandon-Bishop Auckland Walk – all meeting the East Coast rail line between Langley Moor and Durham.

Our walk began at Deerness View Park, and an old map of 1900 on the signboard informed us this park was the site of an old coal mine, now a picnic area. We walked the Deerness Valley, enjoying the change of weather and all the dogs out being walked.

Walking on the Esh Winning rail siding on January 6th

Coal mines were everywhere in this region. When you buy a house in Durham, you have to have it surveyed to see if it's sitting over an abandoned coal shaft. As the University tore down houses last year to construct their new administration building on Stockton Road, they found a mine shaft and had to fill it with rubble before proceeding. Other legacies of the miners are the Durham dialect (not Geordie but "pit-yakking"!), and the numerous council sports facilities that were provided by the government for out-of-work miners.

Turner Prize nominations: art at the BALTIC, Gateshead

It is only the second time that the exhibition of works for the Turner Prize artist nominations has been held outside London: this year in Gateshead – across the Tyne River from Newcastle in northeastern England. The venue is the BALTIC, a converted flour mill silo (which deserves another blog on its own). A friend and I went to view the work of the four nominated artists; the exhibition runs from 21 October 2011 to 8 January 2012, but the Prize will be announced next Monday, December 5th, so we were glad to be able to form our own opinions before being told what is best!

Each artist had one exhibit room for their installation. We wrote off two after puzzling over the work:  Hilary Lloyd's non-sensical video presentations which made me feel seasick, and Karen Black's crumpled paper and plastic bag creations in pastel colours (though I must admit that walking behind the crumpled paper "waterfall", as I interpreted it, was kind of neat).

We disagreed on who should win the Prize. My friend went for Martin Boyce's sculpture installation which included a ceiling of vertical plastic fins representing tree leaves, with oiled paper leaf cutouts scattered across the floor; a wall-mounted panel of seemingly poured concrete with the wood-grain mould pattern overlaid by scattered alphabet-like letters; half a library table top carved with similar letters and mounted on a metal frame of odd angles that was twice as big as the wood table top; wall heating vents that used patterns resembling the letters in their grills; and an obliquely tilted red rubbish bin with torn flannel liner. All these things were interesting in themselves, but a BALTIC Crew member had to explain how they hung together: representing a park with indoor items (the table) placed outside. Fine, but when I have to have a work explained to me, I feel that the artist hasn't got his message across very successfully.

I chose the paintings of George Shaw, all small (ca. 30x40cm) and mounted in traditional form around the room walls. These were done with enamel paints, more often used on model cars, and many were somber bordering on dark. His topics were the mundane aspects of his childhood neighbourhood, both remembered, recreated, and in transition to their current state. None included people, but the manner of painting – flat, fairly solid colours – reminded me of Edward Hopper's work and some were equally "bleak", a word Shaw himself used in his interview video. What struck me was the differential effort put into the detail of the pictures: in the painting "New Houses", a row of orangey coloured tract houses on the horizon were backed by indistinct trees, but the entire foreground was a field fenced off for further development. While the houses were painted without architectural detail, great attention was paid to the field's mudpuddles and drying clay, diverting our focus to things we would probably overlook and discount in our daily life.

So, we await the announcement of the Turner Prize on December 5th with hope and trepidation! Go see, to make your own choices...