I come from a long line of miners. Growing up, I became increasingly aware of their stories, but much more of the story of the miners strike of 1984. I have seen how the passage of time has reduced the stay of miners lives to almost entirely that of the strike. I wanted to use this project to illustrate the loss of folk memory of their lives and communities and its replacement by a singular narrative about the strike. I have used the degradation of video images as a metaphor for this. This effect is known as ‘generational loss’: truly a metaphor for the real life loss of our memories of this way of life.

Spending time at my grandparents and talking especially to my grandfather I discovered a little more of the life he had lived and that many members of his and my grandmother’s families had been involved in mining, and they lived in a former mining town. When grandparents both died around 10 years ago, I realised how little I had really known of their stories and how much of those stories had died with them. Much of what I later understood came through journalism and documentaries about the miners strike of 1984, itself fading from public memory, but revived by a series of documentaries marking the strikes 40th anniversary. Whilst these documentaries were fascinating and important, I realised that they could not tell the wider story of my family and their communities which not only went far beyond the experience of the strike, but moreover the strike tended to overwhelm the story of their lives and communities.

The miners strike ran from 6 March 1984 to 3 March 1985. The strike was lost and the subsequent closure of the mines devastated entire communities, leaving deep social and economic scars that persist today. A selection of these documentaries is listed in the appendix.

Whilst documenting this has been crucial for exposing miscarriages of justice and violations of rights, its is far from the whole story of miners, their communities and my family’s story. As Arthur Scar gill, president of the National Union of Miners, stated in 1984, "We are protecting not just our jobs but the very communities in which we live.” These communities have faded as the lifeblood that sustained them was severed and is overshadowed by a repeated focus on the strike's dramatic events.

Drawing from my own family’s generational history in the mines, I created a performance to document this narrow depiction and its effects.