Conference of the Postgraduate Contemporary Women's Writing Network, 11-12 Sept 2009, at University of Oxford

A couple of days ago I presented, Underbelly, my most recent work of digital fiction (an almost finished work-in-progress) at the Writing Bodies/Reading Bodies conference in Oxford. Underbelly is about a woman sculptor carving a figure on the site of a former Yorkshire colliery now landscaped into a country park, but it also includes stories of the women miners who used to work underground in the 19th Century. As I said in my introduction, there’s a long association of the female body with the land, e.g. Mother Earth, but it’s perhaps little known that women used to work underground, hauling coal like beasts of burden. This history is largely forgotten, almost erased apart from a few websites (see below), and now the colliery sites themselves have been erased from the landscape too.

National Coal Board Collection: Portrait of a Miner 2 disc set from BFI

So it’s with great interest that, on my return from the Writing Bodies conference, I read in the Guardian that the British Film Institute is launching a ‘major restrospective of its extraordinary archive of mining films.’ In his article, Pitmen at the pictures, playwright Lee Hall makes a similar point about the effacement of our working class history:

As soon as the pits started closing all evidence of their existence was erased. I remember driving around the Durham coalfield trying to find locations for the movie of Billy Elliot, desperate to get a glimpse of an archetypal winding gear, and shocked to find they’d all been knocked down. Similarly the industry seems to have been Photoshopped out of the national imagination as if the working classes didn’t exist any more – as if all that labour history was an embarrassment to the consensus of all the major parties, who now see us as consumers rather than producers.

Thankfully Photoshop is just as good for montage as it is for airbrushing out and I have used it for Underbelly to put women miners back into the picture in an interactive collage of imagery and voices from my imagination and historical sources. I’ll be publishing the piece, created in Flash, on crissxross.net fairly soon.

For more about the history of pitwomen see A Web of English History: The Peel Web or A Modern History Sourcebook: Women Miners in the English Coal Pits or Women in World History Curriculum: The Coal Mines, Industrial Revolution