The Violence of Forgetting reclaims archival photographs once deemed worthless and destined for landfill, transforming them into layered artworks that confront the deliberate erasure of North East working-class culture and history.

For more than two centuries, the mining communities of the North East helped power Britain’s industrial strength. Their dismantling in the 1980s and 1990s was not an economic inevitability but a political choice, one that reshaped the region’s industrial and social landscape. Pits that had worked for over a century closed with little notice, equipment was destroyed to prevent reopening, and the headframes that defined village skylines were demolished in what many described as funerals for the communities they represented.

Today, almost every physical trace of the Durham coalfield has gone. These communities are now mentioned nationally mostly in discussions of deprivation or the rise of the far right. Yet memory persists: heritage groups and individuals work to keep it alive, and in 2025 the 139th Durham Miners’ Gala again drew vast crowds, a collective refusal to forget.

These montages are made from rescued acetate negatives and glass plates dating from the 1930s to the 1950s. Once vital records of Durham’s coal industry, its underground labour, landscapes, community life and celebrations, they were discarded after the pits closed, like so many other working-class artefacts considered expendable by official history.

When I found them, many negatives had fused together through decades of neglect, compressing different moments into one, an accidental flattening of history. Chemical decay had turned their monochrome into blues and browns. I work with this deterioration, layering damaged negatives and glass plates to create surreal montages in which time and memory collapse. Underground labour merges with surface celebration, producing ghostly, fragmented images that mirror how traumatic memory works: disjointed, overlapping, powerful yet impossible to fully grasp.

The decay itself carries meaning. Glass plates bear the fingerprints of unknown technicians, traces of skilled, anonymous labour that has vanished along with the industry it recorded. Left alone, these images would disappear entirely, just as collective memory fades without care. Rescuing them is both an artistic intervention and an act of preservation.

Forgetting is not passive but active, not inevitable but chosen. These photographs ask us to remember, and to question why some stories were judged unworthy of keeping. They stand as both remembrance and resistance against the violence of selective national amnesia.