Pits and Pansies 2023 - Ongoing
Textiles, Writing, Community Performance
North Pennines, UK
Textiles, Writing, Community Performance
North Pennines, UK
Pits and Pansies1 unearths narratives of extraction and refusal in the North of England. Saturated within Nenthead, a pit village where the bullets for the British Empire were forged, it entwines colonial extraction with the intersectional solidarities that defied state subjection. It is narrated and enacted by a series of ten hand-drawn, dyed, sewn and printed fabric banners that were formed with the communities at Nenthead. These banners, which were paraded in the 2024 Miners’ Gala, weave together the interscalar and intertemporal histories of the lead mine and imagine the collective and queer possibilities emerging through the horizons of its toxic soil.2
Prelude
2023
Photographs
Photographs
The pit-town of Nenthead,3 in the North East of England, seems grafted with a no-colour, December monochrome. It is an atmospheric tone only imbued in the North Pennines, five hundred metres above sea level. Skies are dense and vaporous, like a smoke that has drifted over from Durham’s factories that scold in the valley below.
Standing behind the village’s community centre, this grey permeates through the land into its deep surface. Veins of leaden rock course under the isolated town. These metal deposits were mined by the British Empire and reforged on the surface as bullets. Today, great piles of ashen rock recline across Nenthead’s southern face. Stones settle on the land like spent shot, the discarded waste of imperial ammunition production.
Clustered in rough, undulating carpets, these mounds rise up to sixteen metres across this rolling topography. As you get closer, their granular mass smudges into the horizon, hard rock blurring into damp fog. Microscopic traces of toxic lead still permeate the heaps, seeping and exhaling into local atmospheres and waters.
The rock packs sprawl out through the landscape as monumental accumulations of spoil, the residue of mining operations that have marked Nenthead’s horizons for 350 years. These cairns of smelting by-product rock lie across the terrain, untouched by any extraction for the last forty years. The Nenthead pit ceased operations in the 1984/85 Miners’ Strike.
Brass
2024
Photograph
2024
Photograph
Today, though, they are surrounded with life. A mass of people, bound in voices and brass fanfare, filter over this debris. The once quiet early morning landscape hosts a large, noisy parade of people that begins to move out of the pits and into the valley below.
Across the terrain, the party shifts for half a day over the land marked by mining, moving through channels and dry stone enclosures. Progressing across the land, the topography is now overcome with singing voices - a fissured expanse stitched together by the procession.
Separation usurped with song.
Pansies
2024
Photograph
As we walk, bordered on each side by a brass band, there are purple pansies beneath our feet. The darker hue of the petals in the mine now subdue into lilac, heather and mauve. The procession walks with these flowers not as a line, but as a thickness, a drift, a diffusion of connected bodies.2024
Photograph
Gala
2024
Photograph
2024
Photograph
Eventually, another village joins the polyphony. They carry banners - colourful silk fabrics attached to wooden braces - that contrast against the grey sky. These textiles carry both woven images and printed mottos, declaring variously: Strength, Solidarity, Resistance, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, and Emancipation through Unity.
This procession marks the beginning of the Durham Miners’ Gala. Known locally as ‘The Big Meet,’ mine towns have concentrated, across this terrain, on the second Saturday of July for the past 153 years.4 They march, following regional wetnesses5 - rivers and streams sourced in Nenthead - from their villages until they reach the city of Durham (Wray, 2009)
Parade
2024
Photograph
The parade is a tangle of mineworkers, companions and kin. The members of the pit communities form a perimeter of coloured fabric around a wetland under Durham’s Cathedral. Inside the porous edge of the procession, tales of struggle from this toxic land are shared. That history, however, is also flooded with stories of resistance, community and solidarity.
Originating as a protest against the conditions of serfdom imposed upon mining communities, the Gala is now a space of metabolism. The industry that underpinned these many communities is reformed in these conversations and banners, not as a loss, but as a possibility, a space in which aspirations for living collectively within the constant presence (and present) of extraction can flourish.
2024
Photograph
The parade is a tangle of mineworkers, companions and kin. The members of the pit communities form a perimeter of coloured fabric around a wetland under Durham’s Cathedral. Inside the porous edge of the procession, tales of struggle from this toxic land are shared. That history, however, is also flooded with stories of resistance, community and solidarity.
Originating as a protest against the conditions of serfdom imposed upon mining communities, the Gala is now a space of metabolism. The industry that underpinned these many communities is reformed in these conversations and banners, not as a loss, but as a possibility, a space in which aspirations for living collectively within the constant presence (and present) of extraction can flourish.
Pits and Pansies
2023
Charcoal, pansy dyes, paint, acetone transfer, archival photographs and metal thread on fabric
150 x 150cm
2023
Charcoal, pansy dyes, paint, acetone transfer, archival photographs and metal thread on fabric
150 x 150cm
Pits and Pansies follows this parade and its historic entanglements to navigate the ongoing afterlives of imperial lead mining in the North East of England. Rooted in Nenthead - a former pit-village where metal was excavated and reforged into bullets for the British Empire - it unearths a community still grappling with the lingering overspills of extraction and colonisation. Though the industry ceased in 1984, its violences persist: residual mining pollution continues to condition lands, waters, and human and more-than-human lives in the region.
These virulent histories unfold alongside the village’s return to the Durham Miners’ Gala, for the first time in forty years. Through this procession, text and image trace contaminated bodies and exhausted mines alongside networks of solidarity and care. Nenthead’s history of resisting extraction emerges through affective kinships with queer communities and multispecies connections - alliances that continue to endure and flourish within an increasingly polluted terrain.
Life in Nenthead persists beyond the end of mining, in a landscape seeped in its deathly wastes. More-than-just-a-toxic-leftover, this post-industrial topography is saturated by resilience, weirdness, and intimacy. Here, bodies are immersed in the wastes of imperial violence, purple flowers are nourished by toxic soils, and queer activists support soup kitchens for starving miners who consume these very petals. Nenthead harbours queer ecologies that defy boundaries of kinships, normative acts of care, and refuse notions of refuse.6
The parade - are structured around ten fabric banners, created with the Nenthead community over the course of a year, to accompany the procession in July 2024. The new textiles contain much: bodies and solidarities that have resisted extraction, alongside chemical evidence of the ongoing mining toxicity. They are also saturated in purple, matter and hues drawn from local flowers, that simultaneously bear material witness to lead pollution and the entanglements of grief, beauty, and endurance in this virulent terrain. Importantly, they carry the many communities that have defied the pit: miners, gays, pansies, and suffragettes. Step by step, this chorus of fabric, text and bodies presents, imagines, and enacts a collective future to make life with lead liveable.
Extraction
2024
Charcoal, pansy dyes, paint, acetone transfer, archival photographs and metal thread on fabric
150 x 150cm
Charcoal, pansy dyes, paint, acetone transfer, archival photographs and metal thread on fabric
150 x 150cm
The town of Nenthead is laced with toxicity.7 Built in 1750 to house workers for the adjacent mine, the village is thick with particles of lead. Deep veins of metal were brought to the surface during the years of active mine operation. Manually hewn ore was heated over burned peat to distil out molten lead, and the remaining crag—the melted stone pockets that litter the landscape—was considered a profitless mass (Moore, 2015). Waste (Sopwith, 1989).
Piles of this smelting by-product were discarded across the town, bisected by a stream that once powered the mine. The sixteen-meter-tall mounds of this once-considered-waste are, however, not completely excised of metal, and they leach into regional waters (Coal Authority, 2020). Within the old smelting mill, lead levels in the soil reach up to 134,000 mg/kg, 2000 times the Environmental Agency’s safety limit (Graham et al., 2019).
Seep becomes spill as a new season of metallic toxicity emerges. Precipitated by the afterlives of regional extraction—centuries of coal burning in Durham’s valleys and metal smelting in upland moors—acid rainfall from the valley below envelops Nenthead from August to March (Wang et al., 2022). During these months, lead particles inundate the village stream in greater concentrations and move out into the landscape beyond the mine (Oakley et al., 2012).
Accumulation
2024
Charcoal, pansy dyes, paint, acetone transfer, archival photographs and metal thread on fabric
Charcoal, pansy dyes, paint, acetone transfer, archival photographs and metal thread on fabric
150 x 150cm
North Pennine lead was once an essential, entangled aspect of the British Imperial project.8 Buildings across this landscape still bear the insignias of the New Zealand Company, as many of the workshops and smelting houses were constructed in the nineteenth century in order to supply pipe work and bullets to the British colony of Dunedin,9 a coastal city settled in Ōtepoti, Aotearoa (Kincey et al., 2022).
The bay at Ōtepoti was first sighted in 1770 by the HMS Endeavour, the vessel of Middlesbrough-born Captain Cook, whose hagiographic museum now lingers on the plains below the Nenthead mine (Rigby & Van Der Merwe, 2002). British occupation of Aotearoa began permanently from 1848 onward (McKinnon, 2022), instigated by the New Zealand Company, an imperial-business entity focused on Aotearoa’s systemic colonisation and funded by John Lambton, one of the wealthiest mine owners in the North of England (Gibbon Wakefield, 1837).
Sailors stood upon lead-lined vessels and peered through telescopes fitted with lenses of flint glass. Ōtepoti’s distant coast presented itself without explicit markings of permanent settlement or agriculture. The land was thus claimed by the navy for the British Crown via terra nullius, an all-too-familiar expression of Indigenous erasure creating voids of land ownership and occupation through which concurrent colonial usurping was legitimised (NZHistory, 2021).
This juridical assertion, undercutting even Cook’s own earlier accounts, elided the presence of Māori populations that had settled the cove several hundred years before its ‘discovery’ by Pennine interlopers (Reid, 2016). The Māori iwi had developed sophisticated means of inhabiting Ōtepoti’s highly complex ecosystems, charged with surface moisture, densities of swamp repo raupo (wetlands) and temporal food sources (Reid, 2016). Existence within this watery continuum was brought into violent encounter with the landscape conceptions and capital impetus of the British Empire (LEARNZ, 2001). The very nature of this abundant landscape—its dense woodlands, thick bogs and seemingly itinerant cultivation—was supported by a unique productive absence of land ownership that lay beyond and challenged the thin value judgements of the Northern settlers (Toitū Otago Settlers Museum, 2014).
The bay, a place of important spiritual, bodily and more-than-human nourishment, was imperially reconstructed as a place full of danger, disease, and darkness, cartographically impenetrable to the imperial government and, importantly, void of profitable enterprise (Jacobs, 2006). Moreover, entwined in this categorisation, the social worlds at Ōtepoti were deemed backwards and primitive, in comparison to their supposedly advanced subjugators (da Cunha, 2019; Scott, 1998).
Such an imagination, almost certainly in bad faith, sought to legitimise the displacement of these ecologies for permanent settlement, a toxic contortion of supposed care, of so-called civilising. Repo raupo were deliberately desiccated, forming a dryness into which the Dunedin grid was overlaid, with an attendant infrastructure of roads (Reid, 2016). Moreover, year-round irrigated plantations, monocultures of British potatoes, extended beyond the city into iwi foraging grounds (Royal & Kaka-Scott, 2015). Indigenous and more-than-human lives were separated from their means of subsistence, spirituality, reservoirs of knowledge and spaces of community. Māori were thus largely only able to access water from restricted infrastructures and food with capital sought from newly formed labour hierarchies, often working as barely waged labourers in the fields of potatoes (Marx, 1990).10 Ōtepoti and its inhabitants were mined for profit.
These systemic processes of segregation, that simplified complex mutualities into a profit-making apparatus, were sustained by the extraction of metal in Nenthead’s hills.11 Shot ammunition, transported down the granite massif, across channelised rivers and out of Newcastle’s port, both enforced the new social stratification and were used to suppress acts of Indigenous resistance. Lead ducts cast in Nenthead’s expansive foundry were used in the drainage infrastructure that destroyed sustaining pools and marshlands in Ōtepoti (Beattie, 2022). Those waters were channelled away to irrigate New Zealand Company plantations. The profits from those plantations flowed back, through imperial networks, to the company mine, maintaining the asymmetric worlds of extraction and capital, and motivating further excavation in Nenthead.
As one territory expanded, so did the other.
Toxicity
2023
Charcoal, pansy dyes, paint, acetone transfer, archival photographs and metal thread on fabric
Charcoal, pansy dyes, paint, acetone transfer, archival photographs and metal thread on fabric
150 x 150cm
The North East of England is haunted by these colonial violences.12 Lead particles, created during the colonial operation of the mine, now accumulate far along the River Nent.13 Toxicity overspills the physical and temporal bounding of the land, conditioning communities—human and more-than-human—beyond the supposed end of extraction (Nixon, 2011).
Whether cooking, bathing, swimming or drinking, lead infiltrates through bodies. As it is ingested, metal moves along calcic pathways into the gut, into blood, before mineralising in bones, teeth and nerve cells (Rădulescu & Lundgren, 2019). With a 60-year cellular half-life, skeletons lose density over time as lead progressively replaces calcium, echoing its formation in limestone 290 million years ago (Shepherd et al., 2009). And so, veins shift into veins.
As such, osteoporosis rates in Nenthead are three times higher than the national average (Coal Authority, 2023). In time, as the metal particles fuse to neural pathways, overrunning their banks like the River Nent, they erode memories. Northern bodies have become metabolised by metal.
Body
2022
X-Ray on Gelatin silver print
20 x 20 cm
2022
X-Ray on Gelatin silver print
20 x 20 cm
Lead suffuses my body, too. I grew up in this region and accumulated metal from conception to the present. Drinking, swimming, dissolving, washing, eating, inebriating, osmosing and umbilically exchanging within my mother’s body, lead is alloyed to my neurons.
Kinship
2023
Charcoal, pansy dyes, paint, acetone transfer, archival photographs and metal thread on fabric
150 x 150cm
Charcoal, pansy dyes, paint, acetone transfer, archival photographs and metal thread on fabric
150 x 150cm
Some bodies, however, defy this extractive toxicity.14 Deadly to most more-than-humans, the Purple Mountain Pansy flourishes on lead-inundated soils.15 It exists in a metallic symbiosis with the rhizosphere, where lead saturates its roots and stem and builds in the epidermal cells of growing buds (Pourrut et al., 2011).
Anthocyanins, pigments in the petals, however, form a chemical architecture embracing lead molecules in a non-toxic assemblage. This process also turns the flowers purple (Hosseinniaee et al., 2023). Across the landscape, toxicity can be read with these violet signs, whose intensity increases with metal concentration.
Metallic metabolism within the plant disobeys the toxicity of lead. The deathly residue of extraction—lead particles once considered waste—does not progress on its continuum of wasting bodies. Instead, pansy and pollutant create a resilient and queer entanglement, a lead-loving flower, that flourishes beyond the supposed end of the mine’s productive life (Yusoff, 2015).
Through the pansy, contamination becomes, rather, a companion.
Solidarity
2023
Charcoal, pansy dyes, paint, acetone transfer, archival photographs and metal thread on fabric
150 x 150cm
Charcoal, pansy dyes, paint, acetone transfer, archival photographs and metal thread on fabric
150 x 150cm
Around this flower, other stories of defiance grow.16 During the 1984/85 Miners’ Strike, as Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Government removed benefits for striking families, hunger was weaponised to enforce a return to extraction (Booth & Smith, 1985).
In an act of collective resistance, various spaces in Nenthead were reappropriated by women as a purple ecology of soup kitchens and community halls. In these commoned sites, pansies, that witches and wisewomen once shared as medicine across the peatlands fissured by the mine, were served in restorative broths (Federici,2004). Ingested, the antioxidants harboured in the petals helped reduce the absorption of lead by the body.
This highly local solidarity was nourished across social and cultural boundaries. Many of the ingredients for these restorative soups were sponsored by queer activists groups, such as Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, organising ‘Pits and Perverts’ fundraising parties in London (Jackson, 2024). Events that represented a form of deterritorialized kinship was formed between the urban centres of the South and mine-town peripheries in the North.17
This intersectional solidarity, entwined with projections for living within mining communities, was conserved, reconsidered and celebrated every year in the Durham Miners’ Gala. On the second Saturday of July, residents processed with iconographic banners, fabric instruments remade each year to project collective futures.18 For twelve hours from Nenthead to Durham, the village dreamed together across landscapes inundated with lead (Wray, 2009).
Nenthead, however, has not paraded since 1984, when its banners were torn by police on the picket line and the mine closed. Today, those ripped fabrics sit in a retired miner’s living room, next to a portrait of Mabel Tuke, a local suffragette nicknamed ‘Pansy’ by Emmeline Pankhurst (Priestman, 1910).19
Collectivity
2023
Photograph
Photograph
The banners that accompany villages through the Durham Miners’ Gala are the public representations of the communities that follow behind their lofted fabrics.20 The 2-by-2-metre tapestry, its detailing, patterns, foliation, colours, adages and illustrations materialise the collective aspirations of the town. Originating as trade union standards with symbols ordered from a book of Arts and Crafts stencils, the banners have developed their own codes over the many decades of ‘The Meet.’ Across the Gala, fabrics typically depict a large central icon, framed by a foliated border (Wray, 2009).
The ten new banners for Nenthead allude to this structure, providing a series of square tapestries articulated in the proportions of the original torn fabric. The depictions, however, shift across the many scales and temporalities entangled by processes of extraction.21 Drawn collectively with residents over a period of six months in layers of charcoal, acetone print and pansy-dyes, the fabrics are embodied with both metal and time, existing in a landscape where millennia – the formation of lead in limestone – and millisecond – the movement of lead into flower petals – exist at once.
The spatial aspirations presented on the banners – visions of collective life shaped by mutual care, environmental repair rooted in the purple mountain pansy, and the reclamation of post-industrial land flourishing with joy – move out of their fabric surfaces into the town, as the intensely communal preparations for the Gala continue the history of spatial defiance in Nenthead.22 The fabrics were produced together, drawing, sewing, stitching and printing alongside a wider ecology of dinners, band practices, rehearsals and walks that reappropriate the topography, transformed by and for extraction, for collectivity. Through these repeated processes, the spatial subversions of the year-long strike—the occupation of public space, the re-routing of daily rhythms around communal care, and the repurposing of industrial infrastructure for collective sustenance—are re-enacted and preserved across the village, while the communally produced fabrics become layered with the collective memory of the town. The banners aspire to a social geology, remade each year in palimpsest to project aspirations of life within a terrain of constant change.
Refusal
2024
Photograph
Photograph
After forty years, Pits and Pansies returned the procession to Nenthead, becoming a means through which the village can resist and repair within the toxic afterlives of mining.23 Its preparation and performance lives amongst the strange kinship formed between pansies24 and lead, platforming and metabolizing ecological, gender, labor and queer resistances to extraction in the region.
Year after year, we will return, moving among both pits and pansies to celebrate the joy that makes life with lead liveable.
Collaborators and Credits
Kirsty MacLeod, Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe), Merve Anil, Rosa Whiteley, Dr Maria Shéhérazade Giudici, Margarida Waco, Contrado Imaging, Royal College of Art, The Mining Institute, Eric Lea, Mary Ford, and Vera Hutchinson
Kirsty MacLeod, Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe), Merve Anil, Rosa Whiteley, Dr Maria Shéhérazade Giudici, Margarida Waco, Contrado Imaging, Royal College of Art, The Mining Institute, Eric Lea, Mary Ford, and Vera Hutchinson
Awards
First Prize, Best Architecture Drawing, 2025 - RIBAJ Eyeline Drawing Prize - Royal Institute of British Architects - June 2025
First Prize, Best Architecture Drawing, 2025 - RIBAJ Eyeline Drawing Prize - Royal Institute of British Architects - June 2025
RIBA Silver Medal - Nomination - Royal Institute of British Architect - December 2024
Dean’s Prize - Adrian Lahoud / Royal College of Art School of Architecture - July 2024
Publications and Lectures
Pits and Pansies: Drawing as Social Geology - Drawing Research Forum - Drawing Room - February 2026
Pits and Pansies: Entanglements of a flower across personal, contaminated, and flourishing geologies - Staying with the Trouble - Feral Worlding, Issue 01 - November 2025
Pits and Pansies: Metabolisms of resistance in the North East of England lead mines - Landscape Research - September 2025
Pits and Pansies - Architecture Beyond Extraction - Journal of Architectural Education Issue 79.1 - February 2025
Exhibitions
Feral Worlding - November 2025
Making Kin - BASE Milano / Milan Design Week - April 2025
Durham Miners Gala - 2024
Notes
1 Hello! Thank you for being here and moving with us through the procession. I hope that these footnotes accompany this unfolding narrative much like the conversations that arise along a parade - moments in which stories surface, context is expanded, and meaning is reframed. These words will hold anecdote alongside citation, grounding the knowledges and works upon which Pits and Pansies stands and situates itself, while also offering directions for those less familiar with the metal veins of the North of England. This framing is indebted to many, but draws particularly on Max Liboiron’s care work across many formats of text (Liboiron, Citation2021).
2 This was the final banner created for the procession, in July 2024. It represents the collaborative processes of meeting, printing, collaging, reading, agreeing, disagreeing, and deciding - each central to the research, writing, and parading that comprise what I am calling Pits and Pansies. Nearly all of these gatherings took place around a pair of bifold tables, joined to form a square and draped in purple cloth. There, we shared teas and soups – garnished with purple pansies – as well as recipes, archival fragments, sketches, maps, documents, and stories.
3 Nenthead sits fifty kilometres south of the Scottish border atop the North Pennines - the hilly northern spine of England. One of the UK’s highest-altitude villages, its isolated topography holds the sources of three rivers: the Tyne, Tees, and Wear, each flowing eastward towards the North Sea.
4 The Durham Miners’ Gala originated in 1871, following numerous strikes two years prior that protested the Yearly Bond – a system binding miners to a single colliery owner for twelve months. Under this form of industrial serfdom, miners faced imprisonment for attempting to leave their employment and endured steadily diminishing wages and working conditions. These coercive contracts were administered in Durham’s Market Square, beneath a statue of the Marquess of Londonderry—a landowner in Ireland and northern England, notorious among pit communities for deploying military force against strikes and for enforcing child labour. The Market Square later became the original gathering point of the Gala, bringing together collieries that had united during the 1869 strikes. Months after the first procession, which saw 200,000 miners march in solidarity, the Yearly Bond was abolished (Whitehead, Citation2013).
5 Borrowing from da Cunha, I use the term ‘wetness’ to dissolve separations between bodies, lands and waters, understanding them instead as a ubiquitous and varied gradient, a saturation and desaturation of wateryness, and therefore, of dissolved metallic toxicity (da Cunha, Citation2019. p. 6).
6 There exist many constellations within the term queer ecologies. Where writers such as Matthew Gandy have explored this concept through the intersection of sexuality, spatial theory and urban ecologies, this text draws instead especially on the work of Nerea Calvillo and their framing of queering as ‘both a verb and a practice’ - one that unsettles normative conceptions of the environment to embrace complexity, contradiction and connection (Calvillo, Citation2023, p. 240; Gandy, Citation2012). I move with these ways of understanding and challenging out of the city and into the landscapes of Northern England - although these terrains are always entangled and co-constitutive with urban nature. In this context, queer ecologies have many formations: they include queer communities situated in ecological networks; plants that untether categorisations of nourishing/toxic and desirable/waste; affinities cast across oft-considered physical and social boundaries; and other countless, shifting relations.
7 The border of the banner is composed of 52 canvas squares, each 10 cm by 10 cm. These were treated with Sodium Rhodizonate solution – a chemical used to test for the presence of lead in forensic analysis – before being submerged weekly throughout 2023 at a single site in the stream that cuts through the spoil mounds. The deeper pink tones indicate higher lead concentrations. Alongside, the edges of each square were dyed in the corresponding pH test colours taken at the same location, at the same time. Together, they form a material witness and a visual calendar of lead saturation flowing through the stream and out into the surrounding landscape over a year. At the centre of the banner is a large-scale charcoal plan of the mine workings and village. This drawing was developed over several months, beginning with the underland tunnels and gradually building up through layers of dust - drawn, erased, and redrawn – until the surface topography emerged. This technique hoped to reflect the continual processes of accumulation and removal that shape the shifting terrain of Nenthead. Overlaying this is a 1:5 sectional drawing of the largest spoil mounds on either side of the central stream, at the site where the weekly samples were taken. The convergence of plan and section in this image draws from many, but was especially indebted to the visual strategies used by Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha in their work on watery landscapes (Mathur & Cunha, Citation2001).
8 The Accumulation Banner presents an axonometric section through the spoil heaps - the surface deposits of rock extracted from the network of tunnels below. The drawing extends from these piles downward to the granite massif, upon which layers of limestone have sedimented over Millenia. The charcoal section is punctuated by three details: an image of the landscape when the mine closed in 1984, a rubbing of a lead vein inside the tunnel today, and the earliest known photograph of Nenthead’s mine workers – an image that hangs in the local pub. This composition draws from Design Earth’s narrative counter-geographies (Ghosn et al., Citation2016), using square-framed images to reimagine extractive sites not merely as technical infrastructures, but as storied landscapes marked by memory, labour, and loss.
9 Dunedin is nested in the Otago harbour on the south-eastern coast of Aotearoa’s South Island, Te Waipounamu.
10 “The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as primitive, because it forms the prehistoric stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding with it’’ (Marx, Citation1990, pp. 874–875)
11 I have transcribed this particular phrasing of ‘profit-making apparatus’ from Margarida Waco, Imani Jacqueline Brown and Meriem Chabani.
12 The banner depicts Eric Lea, a retired ore excavator who worked - and was worked by - the subsurface veins of lead between 1968 and 1984. His portrait was drawn in charcoal over four day-long sessions at his home, on the same street his family has lived since 1737, facing the spoil mounds just twenty metres away. Three details of his body are interspersed across the portrait: copies of recent medical imagery of his capillaries, duodenum, and femur. At the time, Eric was suffering from advanced osteoporosis, a result of lead replacing calcium in his bones and cells - first through years of exposure underground, and later then through continued contact with contaminated local soils and waters. These three bodily sites - gut, blood, and bone - trace the pathway of lead’s absorption and accumulation. Overlaid across the drawing is a plan of lead deposits in Northern England, collapsing geological and anatomical topographies, as veins shift into veins. Framing the composition, the banner’s border is dyed with sodium rhodizonate and printed with acetone transfers of Eric’s earlier scans and medical reports, evidencing the progressive saturation of lead within his body. This work extends from my prior research with communities living amid super-intensive olive monocultures in Alentejo, southern Portugal (Waco, Citation2023, pp. 59–74), where bodies, landscapes, and toxic exposures are similarly entangled. Similar compositional strategies - also shaped through interviews held around kitchen tables - were used with residents overlooking factories burning bagasse, the pulpy residue left after olive oil extraction.
13 The River Nent is sourced in an unearthed peat bog 2 km from Nenthead and flows out to the east, down the North Pennine mass. The watery bodies it touches downstream course through the largest settlements in the region, Newcastle, Sunderland, Middlesbrough and Durham.
14 The banner centres a 5:1 elevation of a Purple Mountain Pansy emerging from its spoil substrate. Layered across the flower – mirroring the anatomical detailing in Eric’s portrait - are enlarged microscope scans: a petal epidermal cell at 5000:1, a cut-through of root tendril at 500:1, and a cross-section of mycorrhizal hyphae at 50,000:1. These images trace the passage of lead through the pansy and its multispecies networks, following its uptake from contaminated soil via symbiotic fungal associations, into the plant body and ultimately the petal. As more metal is absorbed, the petal’s colour deepens – a visible saturation of toxicity. Within its tissues, lead is chelated: molecular rings bind and stabilise the heavy metal in a non-reactive form. The chelation compound structure is printed directly atop the petal. The flower drawing is overlaid onto a topographic map tracing the rivers that flow from Nenthead to the northeast coast, echoing once more the compositional structure of Eric’s banner. However, here, instead of marking lead veins, the drawing charts the distribution of pansies across the region. Each location is embroidered with thread, dyed using pigments extracted from pansies gathered at that site, and sewn incrementally over the course of a year. The colours shift from deep damson in areas around the mine – where lead concentrations are highest – towards pale lavender at the coast, tracking the dissipation of metal toxicity through the landscape. These threads, dyed with the flowers themselves, act as material witnesses to the contamination seep across the region. Around the border, a tonal key aligns each colour with its corresponding pansy image, map location, measured lead levels in topsoil, and a Pantone hue reference. Together, they form a spectrum of metallic toxicity and floral resilience.
15 Unearthing the intersecting flourishings of the Purple Mountain Pansy in metallic earths draws from a citational web that holds Anna Tsing’s analysis of the Matsuake Mushroom and its disturbed forest soils as a key node (Tsing, Citation2015).
16 The banner depicts the intersecting solidarities that formed to care for and nourish subjected communities within the 1984/85 Miners’ Strike. At the top are members of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM). Below, members of the Nenthead community are portrayed, each of whom played a vital role in supporting the town throughout the strike. They include soup kitchen organisers, makers of the last banner in 1984, a former miner who designed community-owned housing for fellow retirees, a local musician who wrote songs for the picket lines and parades, and the head of the community garden. In the centre, the town voted to place Vera Hutchinson, leader of the local community centre since 1980. She organised the pooling and growing of food during the strike, alongside shared childcare, welfare housing and fundraising, and held the banner when the town last paraded in 1984. She sits in the community hall beneath this ripped historic banner and under a portrait of Mabel ‘Pansy’ Tuke, who gave purple pansies to women in the town during a Suffrage rally.
17 Miners reciprocated the solidarity they had been shown by the queer community, notably campaigning against Section 28 – a law that came into effect under Thatcher’s government, which prohibited local authorities from ‘intentionally promot[ing] homosexuality’ (Pyper & Tyler-Todd, Citation2023; Starr, Citation2024).
18 Thank you to Emilio Distretti for accompanying me on many discussions of walking, progressive nostalgia and the possibilities of procession as care-work.
19 I lived in Durham, two houses down from where Mabel ‘Pansy’ Tuke passed away. No plaque settles amongst the pebbledash to commemorate her presence, only the damson flowers weeding the unkempt lawn. Plucking them as a child, I would rest the petals as morning offerings to the pavement, hoping that violet flourishes grew upon my return from school.
20 The banners took shape over 20 workshops, as well as many shared meals and walks, between Spring 2023 and Spring 2024. We began walking through the mine and the surrounding landscapes, tracing topographies of water and extraction. Each walk culminated in a communal meal - often a soup based on recipes from the Miners’ Strike - and a group draw, where we layered tracing paper, archival fragments, and sketches to begin collaging and drawing futures for the mine while imagining the banners across stacked depths of paper. Charcoal quickly became an essential material: it allowed us to cover space rapidly, erase, and redraw with varying levels of detail. It also held a particular resonance for retired miners, who recalled sketching on tunnel walls with fragments of coal during their underground lunch breaks.
21 The banners, with their entwinement of shifting geographies and scales – holding lead particles, epidermal cells, bullets, hands, spoil mounds, villages, and global imperial formations – draw particularly on the work of Hecht (Citation2018). They also hope to think with Donna Haraway’s use of the Chthulucene to summon the “myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages – including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus” (Haraway, Citation2015, p. 160).
22 The banners at once describe pasts and desired futures. In this way, the fabrics aspire to José Esteban Muñoz’s conception of queerness and futurity, describing that ‘‘Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain.’’ (Muñoz, Citation2009, p. 1).
23 In July 2024, the banners featured within this text were paraded with the community for twelve hours, from Nenthead to Durham, for the first time since 1984. The following writing interweaves this substantive act with speculative proposals for a future procession and its preparation, held by the village. It imagines the possible timelines, spaces, and rituals that could seep into existing patterns of meeting and banner-making to deeper care for the metallic soils and their multispecies inhabitants. The Metabolism banner shows a plan of the bandstand, with a central table surrounded by community members inside the metal structure. Vera Hutchinson sits at the bottom right, preparing a calcium-rich soup topped with purple pansies. In the top corners, perspective drawings show the bandstand in two configurations – for meeting and for eating. The perimeter collage continues from the previous banner, focusing on events from November to February. The remaining border features the soup recipe created in winter 1984.
24 The titling of Drag Artists as Pansy Performers originates in the Pansy Craze associated with the 1930s Ballroom Scene. In a colliery village near Nenthead, a local Drag Queen, simply called ‘Pansy’, still performs songs from this era alongside a wardrobe of period-specific burlesque clothes and allusions to local mining, such as a sequin helmet and a pick reformed as a feather fan.
References
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da Cunha, D. (2019). The invention of rivers: Alexander’s eye and Ganga’s descent. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the witch: Women, the body and primitive accumulation. Autonomedia.
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Priestman, M. T. (1910). Handicrafts in the home. A. C. McClurg & Co.
Pyper, D., & Tyler-Todd, J. (2023). The 20th anniversary of the repeal of section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988. House of Commons Library; House of Commons. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2023-0213/
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Reid, A. (2016). Māori cultural landscapes in Otago [acknowledgement, recognition and preservation [Master’s thesis]. University of Otago. https://ourarchive.otago.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10523/6386/ReidAshleyJ2016MPlan/pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
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Royal, C., & Kaka-Scott, J. (2015). Foods introduced by Europeans. Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. https://teara.govt.nz/en/maori-foods-kai-maori/page-4
Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like the state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. (p. 15). Yale University Press.
Shepherd, T. J., Chenery, S. R. N., Pashley, V., Lord, R. A., Ander, L. E., Breward, N., Hobbs, S. F., Horstwood, M., Klinck, B. A., & Worrall, F. (2009). Regional lead isotope study of UK. Science of The Total Environment, 407(17), 4882–4893. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2009.05.041
Sopwith, T. (1989). An account of the mining district of Alston Moor, Weardale and Teesdale. Davis Books.
Starr, J. (2024). 1984 miners’ strike: Solidarity from marginalised communities - People’s History Museum. People’s History Museum. https://phm.org.uk/blogposts/1984-miners-strike-solidarity-marginalised-communities/
Toitū Otago Settlers Museum. (2014). Traditional wharerau being built. https://www.toituosm.com/whats-on/news/traditional-wharerau-being-built
Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.
Waco, M. (2023). Fertile futures. In A. Garcia, A. Neiva, & D. Aguiar (Eds.), Fertile futures (Vol. 1, pp. 59–74). Architectural Affairs.
Wang, H., Ju, C., Zhou, M., Chen, J., Kan, X., Dong, Y., & Hou, H. (2022). Acid rain-dependent detailed leaching characteristics and simultaneous immobilization of Pb, Zn, Cr, and Cd from hazardous lead-zinc tailing. Environmental Pollution, 307, 119529. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2022.119529
Beattie, J. (2022). Urban conservation and conflict in early Aotearoa: Dunedin Town Belt, 1848–1860s. The Garden History Research Foundation. https://gardenhistoryresearchfoundation.com/2022/02/25/urban-conservation-and-conflict-inearly-aotearoa-dunedin-town-belt-1848-1860s/
Booth, A., & Smith, R. (1985). The irony of the iron fist: Social security and the coal dispute 1984–85. Journal of Law and Society, 12(3), 365–374. https://doi.org/10.2307/1410129
Calvillo, N. (2023). Aeropolis. Columbia books on architecture and the city (pp. 232–270). Columbia University Press.
Coal Authority. (2020). Rivers polluted by abandoned metal mines in England. GOV.UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/riverspolluted-by-abandoned-metal-mines-in-england
Coal Authority. (2023). Metal mine water pollution investigations in the River Wear catchment. GOV.UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/metal-minewater-pollution-investigations-in-the-river-wear-catchment
da Cunha, D. (2019). The invention of rivers: Alexander’s eye and Ganga’s descent. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the witch: Women, the body and primitive accumulation. Autonomedia.
Gandy, M. (2012). Queer ecology: Nature, sexuality, and heterotopic alliances. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30(4), 727–747. https://doi.org/10.1068/d10511
Ghosn, R., Jazairy, E. H., Weng, J., Al-Saffar, R., Sharma, K., Lee, H.-H., Kim, N., & Xiong, S. (2016). After oil: Design earth. Design Earth. https://design-earth.org/projects/after-oil/
Gibbon Wakefield, E. (1837). Outward correspondence. Alexander Turnbull Library.
Graham, J., Banks, S. B., Campbell, I. M., & James, K. (2019). Nenthead (Caplecleugh) mine water treatment (EIA Scoping Report). AECOM.
Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: Making kin. Environmental Humanities, 6(1), 159–165. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615934
Hecht, G. (2018). Interscalar vehicles for an African anthropocene: On waste, temporality, and violence. Cultural Anthropology, 33(1), 109–141. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.1.05
Hosseinniaee, S., Jafari, M., Tavili, A., Zare, S., & Cappai, G. (2023). Chelate facilitated phytoextraction of Pb, Cd, and Zn from a lead–zinc mine contaminated soil by three accumulator plants. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 21185. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-48666-5
Jackson, M. (2024). Lesbians and gays support the miners. http://lgsm.org/our-history/228-lesbians-and-gays-support-the-miners
Jacobs, J. M. (2006). Edge of empire: Postcolonialism and the city. Routledge.
Kincey, M., Gerrard, C., & Warburton, J. (2022). Metals, mines and moorland: The changing lead mining landscapes of the North Pennines, UK, 1700–1948. Post-Medieval Archaeology, 56(1), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/00794236.2022.2058221
LEARNZ. (2001). The importance of Awa to Māori. https://www.learnz.org.nz/rivers211/discover/importanceof-awa-to-m%C4%81ori#:∼:text=For%20M%C4%81ori%2C%20water%20is%20the,a%20priority%20for%20many%20Iwi
Liboiron, M. (2021). Pollution is colonialism (pp. 1–37). Duke University Press.
Marx, K. (1990). Capital a critique of political economy. (B. Fowkes, Trans., pp. 873–942). Penguin Classics.
Mathur, A., & Cunha, D. (2001). Mississippi floods. Mathur/Da Cunha. https://www.mathurdacunha.com/mississippi-floods
McKinnon, M. (2022). Otago region. The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. https://teara.govt.nz/en/otago-region
Moore, J. W. (2015). Capitalism in the web of life: Ecology and the accumulation of capital (pp. 33–91). Verso.
Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity (p. 1). New York University Press.
Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor (p. 8). Harvard University Press.
NZHistory. (2021). Hobson proclaims British sovereignty over New Zealand. https://nzhistory.govt.nz/hobsonproclaims-sovereignty-over-all-of-new-zealand
Oakley, M., Radford, S., & Knight, D. (2012). Rep. Alston Moor, North Pennines – Miner-farmer landscapes of the North Pennines AONB NMP – Aerial investigation and mapping report 4. English Heritage.
Pourrut, B., Shahid, M., Dumat, C., Winterton, P., & Pinelli, E. (2011). Lead uptake, toxicity, and detoxification in plants. Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, 213, 113–136. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9860-6_4
Priestman, M. T. (1910). Handicrafts in the home. A. C. McClurg & Co.
Pyper, D., & Tyler-Todd, J. (2023). The 20th anniversary of the repeal of section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988. House of Commons Library; House of Commons. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2023-0213/
Rădulescu, A., & Lundgren, S. (2019). A pharmacokinetic model of lead absorption and calcium competitive dynamics. Scientific Reports, 9(1), 14225. Article 50654. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-50654-7
Reid, A. (2016). Māori cultural landscapes in Otago [acknowledgement, recognition and preservation [Master’s thesis]. University of Otago. https://ourarchive.otago.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10523/6386/ReidAshleyJ2016MPlan/pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Rigby, N., & Van Der Merwe, P. (2002). Captain cook in the Pacific (p. 25). National Maritime Museum.
Royal, C., & Kaka-Scott, J. (2015). Foods introduced by Europeans. Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. https://teara.govt.nz/en/maori-foods-kai-maori/page-4
Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like the state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. (p. 15). Yale University Press.
Shepherd, T. J., Chenery, S. R. N., Pashley, V., Lord, R. A., Ander, L. E., Breward, N., Hobbs, S. F., Horstwood, M., Klinck, B. A., & Worrall, F. (2009). Regional lead isotope study of UK. Science of The Total Environment, 407(17), 4882–4893. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2009.05.041
Sopwith, T. (1989). An account of the mining district of Alston Moor, Weardale and Teesdale. Davis Books.
Starr, J. (2024). 1984 miners’ strike: Solidarity from marginalised communities - People’s History Museum. People’s History Museum. https://phm.org.uk/blogposts/1984-miners-strike-solidarity-marginalised-communities/
Toitū Otago Settlers Museum. (2014). Traditional wharerau being built. https://www.toituosm.com/whats-on/news/traditional-wharerau-being-built
Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.
Waco, M. (2023). Fertile futures. In A. Garcia, A. Neiva, & D. Aguiar (Eds.), Fertile futures (Vol. 1, pp. 59–74). Architectural Affairs.
Wang, H., Ju, C., Zhou, M., Chen, J., Kan, X., Dong, Y., & Hou, H. (2022). Acid rain-dependent detailed leaching characteristics and simultaneous immobilization of Pb, Zn, Cr, and Cd from hazardous lead-zinc tailing. Environmental Pollution, 307, 119529. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2022.119529