Springtime for Heanor

[Mik Godley]

“Heanor was declared the second-most English town in the country, after nearby Ripley, with almost 90% of the population being English in origin.”


The region around Heanor has a comparable social, industrial and topographic landscape to my ‘native’ West Yorkshire coalfields – gritty and “workman-like”, a million miles away from the England portrayed by the films of Hollywood and Ealing, or the watercolours in the galleries of English beauty-spots – ideas of England that are entirely alien to me. Lower Silesia in Poland and the Czech Republic, similarly, has hills and low mountains of great brooding beauty, together with post-Communist era problems – equivalent to our own post-industrial upheaval – of closed coalmines and declining heavy industry.


Whilst Heanor might not be an obvious choice for landscape painting, my spring of 2006 ‘reconnaissance’ of the town and its environs revealed aesthetic as well as social/cultural interests – the rolling fertile fields of its hills, the landscaped pit-head parklands and giant Tesco’s supermarket suggesting the hopes, and difficulties, of renewal to what has been a decaying coal-mining market town.


In spring 2007 I embarked on a photo-essay, equipped with a borrowed low-resolution digital camera, sourcing some promising images for paintings from my regular commute to Chesterfield, recording aspects of Heanor’s hill as the train passes with the spring season approaching.


During the springs of 2008 and 2009, by way of preparation for the eventual planned field trips to Silesia, this sub-project aims to create photographs, video, sketches, and painting on-site. I aim with Spring-time for Heanor to create an artistic "travelogue" – a critical reflection or “psycho-geographic” study of Heanor as a specific example of more universal population dynamics in Europe, in the context of inward migration and Heanor’s political reputation for nationalism, documenting both this investigative process and my creative responses.

[Goldfactory Admin]

look out for dogs and ufos :-)

[Mik Godley]

No - I think it's pretty well earthed already. I've been on the bus though. Once. Since then I've just passed by on the train.

I think I'll get back on the bus over the next few weeks though - I fancy seeing the spring blossoms on the trees of the landscaped coal pit grounds.

[Goldfactory Admin]

Have you google earthed it?