Processions: Making the Bolsover banner

As part of the Processions 2018 event I was asked by Junction Arts to lead a series of workshops with women in Bolsover and Shirebrook in Derbyshire. The timescale was very short, the number of sessions was limited and they were to be spread across two different locations. This was going to be a challenge. 

The idea was that Artichoke had asked a 100 Arts organisations to each commission a female artist to work with a group of women or girls to produce a banner either to mark the 100 years of some women getting the vote, or to reflect what it’s like to be a woman in the 21st Century. 

I had worked with one of the proposed groups of women last year on the New Bolsover Model Village miners’ banner so I was really looking forward to working with them again. The other location was the church hall in Shirebrook with women with a link to the church and local Polish women, many of whom work in the local Sports Direct warehouse. 

Whilst I was really open to the women dictating the direction of the project I also had a few objectives myself. Firstly I wanted to try and give such a diverse group of women the opportunity to individually express themselves. This would mean sometimes them doing separate ‘bits’ and then somehow combining them together. Secondly I knew that given the subject matter there would be many, quite rightly, banners with a serious message. But given that these aspects of the subject would be featured I wondered if we had scope to try something slightly different and as a result make a banner that would stand out. 

We spent time talking about what the women wanted to theme to be. It was clear that featuring their role models was a reoccurring theme across the groups.   Now sometimes I get an idea stuck in my head. It’s like a bluebottle in a jam jar; it buzzes around and gives me no peace. I had the phrase ‘Smile, it confuses your enemy’ noisily in my head for a number of weeks. I was posting an email with different choice for the women to vote on and just thought I would suggest this as a possible alternative theme. 

It went down extremely well with the women and was democratically chosen for our banner. Lovely Shirley from Shirebrook got very excited and asked if we could have the smiles of ‘their’ women on the banner as well; a plan was being formed. We would have the smiles of 100 women who had been influential to us upon which we would place the embroidered letters of our phrase. 

The Banner: Banner and Banter Part 1

I was commissioned by Junction Arts to work on Banner and Banter.  This was a Heritage Lottery Funded project as part of a major regeneration of New Bolsover Model Village, 190 houses built on Model Village lines in the 1890s to house workers from the Bolsover Colliery.  Since the closure of the pit in the 1990s the houses have been looked after by Bolsover District Council.  The houses are currently being majorly refurbished with new rooves, windows, kitchens and bathrooms.

My project was to work with local residents who belong to the Heritage Craft Group to make a banner to mark this major landmark in the ‘Model’s’ history.  The inspirational starting point was the original National Union of Mineworkers banner that was made in the 1950s and now hangs in St Mary and St Laurence Church.  

There isn’t much of a provenance for this banner; we don’t know who it was made by but there were a number of companies that you could order banners from, selecting imagery from their catalogues or commissioning specific scenes.  They employed sign writers and backdrop painters who would work on their specific parts of the banner. The quality of the painting on the Bolsover banner shows real skill.  Union banners were often double sided; the front to signify the union branch and the back often to signify the benefits of belonging to a union.  In the case of the Bolsover banner the front shows a Cavalier and a Miner shaking hands with the Castle and the Colliery in the background.

This photo by John Harris shows the banner being used in the miner's strike of 1984-5.

We borrowed these replica banners from the Nottinghamshire Coalfields Banners Trust so we could have a good look at a range of other mining banners.  Thanks to Joan and John for lending them to us.

175 years experience, an 80year old sewing machine and a 21st century one

Here are some of the quilt blocks containing family sayings that we built into the ‘Remembered Hug’ project that ran at the National Centre for Crafts and Design last weekend.  It was the closing weekend for the show ‘What have I got to do to make it okay?’ and the opening weekend for ‘Made in the Middle’ and very unusually I had work in both shows.

The idea was to work with residents of Ashfield Lodge Care Home to collect family sayings and catchphrases that we would then digitally embroider out.  This is a photo of Harry and Margaret watching the Pfaff 4.5 in action stitching out Harry’s phrase “Hells bells and buckets of blood”.  As some patients living with dementia find ‘fiddling with stuff’ calming we also embellished the blocks with ribbons, buttons and buckles.

Members of the general public lent a hand adding to our collection of catchphrases and stitching on buttons.  Indeed one lady spent hours on my Grandmother’s 1938 hand powered Singer joining scraps into blocks and the piecing blocks.  We used that machine to construct the first lap blanket with another two being finished off by the lovely team at Ashfield