Post Coal
The Space Inbetween 92 and 26 Making Sense of it all.
Taken in the George Thornton Gallery September 2025
So, I was having this conversation with a collector at a recent show about subcultures and how the things that influenced us when we were starting our Higher Education journeys seemed to drip into some of the movies that defined the 90’s, burning away like a mollecular acid into our collective psyche and scorching the conversation towards the rise of a new wave of makers both auditory and visually.
To get this part of the resonance correct, you would have to look at the work I had made for “Coal” and the ideas behind the work which came about through discussions about industrial sound with my daughter Storm. For the sake of continuity and following the thematic behind the work, Storm and her auditory offerings represent the new in comparison to the ideas of old which I bring forward into the artwork.
The ideas have to start somewhere, this piece could of remained untitled however.
The sound, which is a great starting point for this came from naturally occurring sound in the studio, the grey whirr of the angle grinder mixed with the sound of a butane propane mix propelling heat into a 1940’s era artillery shell, the sound of energy escaping through a tower, the sounds of scraping steel over raw iron sheets, power tools whirring away.
The conversation was along the lines of “what influenced you to create Coal?” and it became so hard to answer as there were so many ideas behind the process, you could almost compound the whole thing down to about 2 albums and 3 films, weirdly, only one of the films ever reference coal or coal mining to that point. Even looking back at the show now, you have to stop yourself from overthinking every single Fincher inspired influence and try and focus on the sharp points of Industry, the decline of post 1970’s industrialisation in England, the struggle of communities in the Midlands against the tirade of Thatcherism and Idealism.
Radcliffe On Soar 35-35cm Oils Coal and Bolts on Steel
For her part in the collaboration, Storm represented the new, the innovative way of mixing music that you can create by taking nothing more than an iphone a laptop and a couple of mic’s off amazon and mixing everything through Logic Pro and a Scarlett. Auditory sound that can be made on the move and mixed within the confines of a studio space. We had spent time listening to various soundtracks from the 90’s, we’d listen to the original Terminator score, composed by by Brad Fiedel which came out when I was a kid, this completely changed how films were made and how we visualised our future in a post industrial sense alongside Prodigy “Music for a Jilted Generation” and my memories sitting in an XR3I listening to this when it first came out in 94. Maybe what we were trying to create was for me an Ode, for Storm it was a response to what she had seen me producing and the sound that a studio makes, the very heartbeat of the music. This would somehow play against the industrial artwork which I was creating in response to the final collapse of the Coal industry in Radcliffe on Soar, the last final coal fired power station in Britain. One film sticks in my mind when talking about this, it was Finchers Alien 3, a film which is so underrated by those in the filmmaking community, but a film which opening scenes were shot in Seaham in County Durham which had original Coal fired collieries showing. The film is loaded with ideas regarding the collapse of industry, the quest to find a god on a planet in the back water of the solar system, the rise of company politics and how they can eventually control governments. The cast and ensemble was epic, a mix of some of the best supporting actors of a generation, which added to the darkness and bleak realities of industry, I am still unsure which is more terrifying an 8ft Zenomorph or Philip Davis screaming “Wheres my Fucking Money” ( line taken from 90s cult heist movie Face).
The production design, led by Norman Reynolds seemed to be the most striking as he blends concrete with industrial Iron surface into a lead smelting works, mixed together with my love of the colourfields created by Rothko, at this point I wondered wether visual directors were influenced by Rothko or not? The bleached out look from a simple council painted line on a building sandblasted by years of the salt of successive failure to maintain a structure. The idea that Rothko was miles before his time, but so instrumental in how he shaped Modern Art seemed to bleed into the initial concepts from once studying A Level and taking the step forward into a time of creating. 2026 was where I found myself, post 2015 Fractured, the politics of landscape, how we mine and brutalise the earth we stand on. The early concept ideas behind a new show, where the ideas will take us, the materials which will be used to create art once again.