Colourfoul miner's paintings

Picture (Tom Lamb- Testing for Gas) from the book Shifts of Light - Mining Art in the Great Northern Coalfield (Robert McManners & Gillian Wales

"From the early nineteenth century coal mining was to dominate the North East of England for one hundred and fifty years. It provided employment, determined townscapes and population distribution, created hardships, dominated skylines but above all spawned communities. These tightly-knit mining fraternities provided the miner with all his basic needs. Historically the miner has always felt the need to express himself both politically and creatively. (...) This took many forms - a pride in the size of a leek, the speed of a whippet, the flight of a pigeon, the beauty of a chrysanthemum, the sound of a brass band, the recitation of a verse, the writing of a play or latterly the painting of a picture. The resulting body of art produced in the Great Northern Coalfield is as fascinating as it is diverse."

The Art Mining Gallery in Bishop Auckland explores working life in the coalmines through original artefacts and artwork from prominent mining artists. It is very well worth a visit.

 

Purple "Our moon" in the lumiere

In November 2017 the light festival (Lumiere Durham) came to Durham again. Artists from around the world illuminated the city with a series of light installations. It was interesting to see all the different installations but slightly disappointing that the crowds had to follow the designated paths and had to behave like  sheep in a herd. Therefore, the most pleasant time was spent in the church of Our Lady of Mercy and St Godric's, which offered tea and cake for free, talking with two old ladies from Durham.

"Our moon" (Hannah Fox) - Using motion capture techniques similar to a Hollywood Blockbuster, 80 Durham residents’ unique facial expressions were digitally captured and transferred over to drive the drawn animation of Our Moon. Four Moons were created from the residents of Durham; childhood, youth, maturity, wisdom. Each evening of Lumiere Durham 2017 a different moon watched over the city and its people.

Transparent ice cores at the British Antarctica Survey

"Ice cores are cylinders of ice drilled out of an ice sheet or glacier. Most ice core records come from Antarctica and Greenland, and the longest ice cores extend to 3km in depth. The oldest continuous ice core records to date extend 123,000 years in Greenland and 800,000 years in Antarctica. Ice cores contain information about past temperature, and about many other aspects of the environment. Crucially, the ice encloses small bubbles of air that contain a sample of the atmosphere – from these it is possible to measure directly the past concentration of gases (including carbon dioxide and methane) in the atmosphere. Direct and continuous measurements of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere extend back only to the 1950s. Ice core measurements allow us to extend this way back into the past. In an Antarctic core (Law Dome) with a very high snowfall rate, it has been possible to measure concentrations in air from as recently as the 1980s that is already enclosed in bubbles within the ice. Antarctic ice cores show us that the concentration of CO₂ was stable over the last millennium until the early 19th century. It then started to rise, and its concentration is now nearly 40% higher than it was before the industrial revolution." (British Antarctica Survey, 2014).