Thank you everyone who came to the Barnsley Civic for ‘Canary in the Coal mine’ on April 11th, a talk and screening to close the exhibition Straight A’s at The Cooper Gallery.
Big thanks to Lucy Dewsnap for brilliantly chairing the event.
‘Canary in the Coal mine’ was a substitute title that I never used in the Straight A’s exhibition, that was originally going to be a work relating to my experiences with anorexia in my late teens early 20s.
I am always very conscious about how to relate to the history and culture of my home town. Some post-industrial towns have in recent years, in my opinion, had their present and future cultures weighed down by the habit of making art that constantly speaks to a refined version of what a place used to be.
Yet I am from Barnsley, a post-industrial mining town. I remember coal mines, albeit defunct ones on the demolition death row.
For those who are not aware of the ‘canary in the coal-mine’ analogy. Some of the worst pit disasters, including the worst one in England which happened in Barnsley in the 1860s, were due to gas explosions. Canaries were historically taken down pits by miners because they were more sensitive to toxic gases, and if the canary became sick or died it was a sign that the miners were also in danger. ‘Canary in the coal mine’ means ‘early warning sign’.
I don’t underplay the sense that some of the struggles I experienced in my young adult years felt like ‘early warning signs’ for a time, 20+ years later, where disorders are part of everyday life, and have basically become normalised. I’m not saying I have clairovoyant or visionary powers, but somehow the struggles that sent me backward, or least sideways in life, have, ironically given me experiences and thus artistic interpretations of things before they became common-place.
I used this opportunity and screening to show a much more edited down, and (in my opinion) aestehtically mature version of my 2019 film ‘Wall, i’. If Straight A’s is the most important project I have ever undertaken, Wall, i is a close 2nd. Both deal with the crisis of self-hood in an age where individualism is promoted above and beyond everything else – the age I grew up into, the age after the fall of any competing ideology to capitalism, specifically neoliberal capitalism.
unfortunately due to issues that were nobodies fault, there were quite a few technical issues with the film whilst it was being screened. Due to this I have posted the film here for anyone who wished to watch the re-edited version.
John B Ledger 