THE DRAGON OF PROFIT AND PRIVATE OWNERSHIP & THE WORKER’S MAYPOLE: PARTICIPATORY PROJECTS INSPIRED BY THE ASHINGTON MINERS UNION BANNER
- Submitting institution
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University of Newcastle upon Tyne
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 257857-84091-1285
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
- Ashington, Northumberland, Edinburgh, Newcastle upon Tyne, Leicester
- Brief description of type
- Participatory art projects, exhibitions, film
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
- August
- Year
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- These interlinked projects by Walker & Bromwich (the artist duo Neil Bromwich, and Zoe Walker, Edinburgh University) originated in an Arts Council England Creative People and Places scheme that aimed to increase arts engagement in Northumberland. The resulting artworks, which included films, participatory performances and public sculpture were presented in different contexts: in Ashington, at the Edinburgh Arts Festival and De Montfort University Gallery in Leicester. One strand of the research culminated in a monumental public sculpture that became a focal point of The Great Exhibition of the North in Newcastle in 2018.
Walker & Bromwich collaborated with the ex-coal mining community of Ashington to make a film inspired by a banner commissioned by the local branch of the miner’s union in 1924. The banner, made for the campaign supporting the nationalisation of the mining industry, draws on mythical archetypes and socialist visual tropes to represent the values of the Mining Federation of Great Britain and the international Socialist Movement. One side depicts a miner as a modern-day St George slaying ‘The Dragon of Profit’ and the other a reworking of Walter Crane’s illustration The Worker’s Maypole (1894).
The film, A Plea for Common Ownership, restaged the banner’s socialist imagery with people from Ashington to examine its usefulness in contemporary contexts. The Dragon was reconfigured as a second performance in collaboration with people from Wester Hailes in Edinburgh, a community similarly impacted by post-industrialisation. The film and performances provided a means through which these communities could re-imagine their relationship to work, profit and labour. Finally, Walker & Bromwich appropriated Grey’s Monument in the centre of Newcastle to re-present Crane’s Maypole as a public sculpture in a civic space used for protest and debate. In so doing, Walker & Bromwich’s work raises wider questions about group dynamics, activism and authorship.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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