MySide: Silver Coins

Between 2013 - 2021, I photographed the rapidly changing coastline of Lynemouth, Northumberland. This place has been shaped by geological and industrial processes, natural forces, and by human effort to live amongst them. The resulting terrain is a palimpsest of time, where histories are written, erased, and rediscovered.

Lynemouth became heavily industrialised over the course of the 20th century. A coal colliery, fuelling a nearby coal power station, which supplied energy to an aluminium smelter formed an industrial ecosystem at Lynemouth which shaped the local culture and economy. The colliery and smelter were decommissioned and later destroyed. The coal power station underwent a conversion into a biomass power station. The transformation of the industrial landscape at Lynemouth reflects ongoing struggle between shifts in energy politics and industry.

Prior to the incorporation of necessary environmental policies, the spoil of local collieries was dumped onto the beach. This artificially extended the coastline out towards the sea. Industrial detritus and household waste were added to the spoil. This fossilised the remnants of domestic consumption alongside the tools and materials of industry within a soup of superfluous excavated material. The resulting geology is a confusion of the geological, the industrial, and the cultural. Rough seas batter the spoil-rock face. This collision of natural force and anthropomorphic geology litters the landscape with a jumble of decades-old material, the half-forgotten memorabilia of its various histories.

A former smelter worker donated a mass of un-archived “archival” images to me, which chronicle the rise and fall of Lynemouth’s industries. They depict the construction of the smelter and coal power station, industrial labour, and survey the land and sea. They provide a historical and “official” counterpoint to my photographs. Much like the waste that has resurfaced from decades gone by, these images have been forgotten about and detached from their original contexts. I have interwoven these images with my own, condensing the past and present and generating new relationships between disparate temporalities and modes of picture-making.

The combination of personal and archival perspectives forms a sequence of images that resists documentary conventions, embracing instead the interpretive agency of the viewer to unravel a sense of the collision of histories in the afterward condition of Lynemouth.

If this piece has you thinking about the changes shaping your landscapes and communities, MySide is open now, and we want to see photographs and projects that explore your side of life.