“I grew up in what was originally a miner’s house on Jingle Pot Road, across the street from the Miners Park subdivision where, in the 1980’s, I delivered newspapers on Coal Tyee Trail and Black Diamond Drive”
Black Diamond Dust is a multi-site art exhibition which considers the coal mining industry that Nanaimo was built upon, an industry that both formed and fragmented communities through economic development, racial segregation and labour inequity, and served as the foundation of global industrialization. It runs until December 13, 2014.
The Black Diamond Dust exhibition is based at both Nanaimo Art Gallery locations, and also involves a series of off-site public projects including a billboard display, a poetry reading, a newspaper insert, and an artist’s intervention in the Nanaimo Museum, among others. There have also been tours of the gallery exhibitions by historian Lynne Bowen and curator Jesse Birch.
Nanaimo’s history is thick with coal
Jesse Birch, the curator of Black Diamond Dust, grew up in Nanaimo, where he lived in what was originally a miner’s house on Jingle Pot Road, across the street from the Miners Park subdivision and, in the 1980’s, he delivered newspapers on Coal Tyee Trail and Black Diamond Drive.
Coal runs through many aspects of Nanaimo’s past, and while there are no local mines operating today, the past is still present when we notice the familiar silhouette of the many former miner’s cabins around town, glance up at the coal seam and capped mine shaft on Cavan Street, or even when we open this newspaper, which reported on mine openings, disasters, strikes, closures, and everything in between, from 1874 until the last mined closed in 1968. Nanaimo’s coal mining history is also present in less noticeable ways. Like house dust that settles under furniture, some traces of the past only appear when things are moved around. — Jesse Birch, in Nanaimo Daily News (Sept. 11, 2014)
Michael Turner, in his review of the exhibit for Canadian Art, observes the layering of art and document. Exhibit viewers at the downtown gallery “are greeted by a remarkable 1:135 scale hand-drawn map (borrowed from the Nanaimo Community Archives) that details the almost vascular construction of Nanaimo’s historic Number One Mine.” Jesse Birch says that the map was used on a daily basis by miners as they selected areas for work. Much of Nanaimo is, in fact, sitting atop a multitude of mine tunnels.
Local contexts, global practices
The artists in Black Diamond Dust look toward forgotten or under-acknowledged histories, while considering both local contexts and the forms of cultural expression that surround global industrial practices. From sculpture, to video, to folk song, Stephanie Aitken, Raymond Boisjoly, Edward Burtynsky, Peter Culley, Devon Knowles, William Notman & Son, Jerry Pethick, Kerri Reid, Scott Rogers and others employ a wide range of creative approaches to articulating the contemporary resonance of material pasts.
Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave (An Injury to One is an Injury to All) (2001), for example (in the downtown gallery), is a gripping feature-length video directed by Mike Figgis that recreates a 1984 clash between striking miners and police which occurred at a British Steel coking plant in Orgreave, South Yorkshire. David Conn, writing in The Guardian as recently as November 14, 2014, titles his article “Heavy-handed policing of the 1984-85 miners’ strike shaped the Britain we still inhabit,” as he calls for further investigation.
There are also photographs in the Black Diamond Dust exhibit from the early 20th century that depict labour strife and government repression. Coal mining in particular is something that links Nanaimo to mining towns in China, Turkey, the Unites States, the United Kingdom, and many other places around the world, observes Birch.
The first of a series of exhibits related to resources
The material traces of industry not only continue to produce the built environment and the objects within it, but also inform the cultural identities of communities that were built on resource-based economies. Through art, Black Diamond Dust enters into a creative dialogue with Nanaimo’s industrial past.
This is the first large-scale project Jesse Birch has prepared and exhibited as interim executive/artistic director of the Nanaimo Art Gallery. Two similar projects are scheduled for the gallery in coming years, in a continuation of focus on resources and their relationship to Nanaimo and the wider world.
Black Diamond Dust continues at Nanaimo’s downtown and university art galleries until December 13, 2014.
We speak with exhibit curator and Nanaimo Art Gallery director Jesse Birch.
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The We Too
Description from Michael Turner’s review in Canadian Art: For We Too (2014 Edition), artist Scott Rogers commissioned an academic named Eileen Wennekers to write a text on the ecological consequences of resource extraction, which the artist then wrote out by hand on stencil paper and reproduced on a Gestetner as a single-page newspaper named after an anonymous grievance sheet (The We Too) published by Nanaimo coalminers. As with Reid’s coal works and Boisjoly’s sign, Rogers’s newspaper is also available at other sites—in this instance, distributed by hand throughout town (the original intention was to insert them into existing papers).
AUDIO: Jesse Birch describes the We Too display 596b_jesse birch_we too_november_20_2014_40
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go! Island – Nanaimo Art Gallery “Black Diamond Dust” – Oct. 10, 2014
