DR LOUISE POWELL

Image from the front cover of Coal Face, Volume 1: Washington by Louise Powell and Andy Martin (Redhills CIO: 2023). Design: Andy Martin.

Coal Face is a combined arts project which tells the stories of mining communities through the words and the faces of the people who are part of them. It is split into two phases:

Coal Face Volume 1: Pilot (May – September 2023)

Commissioned by Redhills CIO with the support of Cultural Spring, University College London and Sunderland Culture.

In May 2023, I was commissioned by Redhills CIO to interview and write for a pilot project which engaged with thirteen of the last men to work among Washington’s collieries. Through a series of engagement sessions held alongside esteemed photographer Andy Martin and project manager Emily Birkett, I was privileged to hear stories about life below the surface and the development of Washington New Town.

I worked with the audio from these interviews to write a series of dialect biographies of each man, along with a collection of eight verbatim poems. The biographies and poems were published by Redhills CIO alongside Andy Martin’s tintype portrait photography in a book entitled Coal Face Volume 1: Washington. The book was released in line with an exhibition at Washington F-Pit Museum.

The verbatim poem ‘After’ by Louise Powell
from Coal Face Volume 1: Washington by Andy Martin and Louise Powell.

I also worked with audio editor Nick John Williams on a podcast episode about the project. I wrote and narrated the podcast, as well as curated the audio from over 14 hours of interviews.

It was a privilege to work on the Coal Face pilot; to engage with so many wonderful people with such interesting stories to tell. I’m delighted to be able to continue this work throughout 2024 and 2025.

Coal Face Volumes 2 and 3 (July 2024 – March 2025)

Funded by an Arts Council National Lottery Project Grant, with the support of Redhills CIO, Cultural Spring, University College London and Sunderland Culture.

Following the success of the Coal Face pilot, I was awarded an Arts Council National Lottery Project Grant for an expanded version of the project. I continued to work in creative partnership with Andy Martin and Nick John Williams to explore mining identities across a range of genders, geographies and generations, with a focus on Washington and Sunderland. I facilitated numerous community engagement sessions, during which I interviewed participants about their mining memories.

From over 32 hours’ worth of raw oral histories, I wove together a series of ‘verbatim’ or ‘found’ poems: sonnets, haiku and free verse. They traced the shift from the smaller pits of the 1800s through to the larger, so-called ‘super-pits’ and the devastation that their closure wrought upon their communities. My poetry was exhibited alongside Martin’s photography at Washington F-Pit Museum (Sept 2024), then Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens (Feb – March 2025). Both exhibitions were extremely popular with local communities, while also drawing visitors from across the UK and attracting attention from such news outlets as BBC Wear, the Sunderland Echo and the Northern Echo. My work was praised for its embrace of dialect expression, its control of craft and, most importantly to me, for telling the true stories of participants in their voices.

My poetry was published in two publications connected to the project, and featured as dramatic readings in three soundscapes produced by the acclaimed Nick John Williams. I also wrote a 3 x 20″ audio documentary podcast series, which can be viewed in more detail on the ‘Podcasts & Audio Drama‘ page.