The Northumbria University Gallery & Baring Wing Presents a Retrospective of Norman Cornish

Written by Alexei Charlton Tuesday, 16 August 2011 01:55

Newcastle, UK. - The Northumbria University Gallery & Baring Wing is proud to present "The Narrow World of Norman Cornish", on view at the gallery until October 7th. Norman Cornish is 91 years old now and still painting. The story of his prodigious career as an artist who converted his experience as a miner into compelling imagery has become justly famous. As the mining industry recedes into history though the real context of his life and art grow ever more elusive. Here are a few reminders. At the time of his birth in 1919 the average death rate in British coal pits was an annual 1.3 per thousand miners.

By the time he started work at the age of 14 technological advances had reduced that figure to 0.75 per thousand but that is to ignore the many accidents. Indeed the Spennymoor pit at which he started his working life, the Dean and Chapter Colliery, was notorious enough locally to be known as ‘The Butcher’s Shop’.


Describing in his autobiography his descent to the coal-face on his first day at work, Cornish recalled that, “The cage dropped very rapidly. About half way down I felt that I was coming upover.” At the shaft bottom he realised that he had been “dropped into a man-made world” and “was to learn that the dangers of gas, stone falls, the darkness and the restricted space, were all to shape these men into industrial gladiators.” For the next 33 years, in a career spent largely underground, Cornish recorded the life of the pit where his ‘marras’ risked their lives every day. He depicted them in the claustrophobic space of the seams or tending pit ponies but of course, his “narrow world” as the novelist Sid Chaplin admiringly called it included that network of customs and shared experiences that bind a community together.

In his scenes of their ‘civilian’ life, miners are shown walking to work in the early dawn, the pit head gantry resembling another Calvary. These unselfconscious metaphors might equally apply to his studies of his wife Sarah knitting which the ambivalently secular Cornish allowed to have “an aura of sanctity”. As for his repertoire of pub interiors, they are, of course, bathed in an amber glow, the colour of brown ale, while the local chip van also looms large as a communal meeting point – for gossip as much as for food. With the demise of the coal industry and the decline of the culture dependent on it, a few pits have been converted into mining heritage centres. They do their job of documentation competently enough but they cannot compare with the heightened, felt experience that Cornish offers. Above all, he presents us with what the American photographer Robert Frank called “the humanity of the moment”.


Established in 1977 as a teaching gallery and the University’s link between town and gown, the University Gallery’s policy is to present exhibitions by artists of national and international distinction, as well as less established but promising artists. By the early 1990s the Gallery’s international profile was firmly established with a series of major touring exhibitions of Edvard Munch’s work including the curatorship of the Frieze of Life exhibition at the National Gallery, London. The Gallery continues to initiate high profile exhibitions with touring links in America, Japan, Greece, Italy and Germany while maintaining an annual programme of exhibitions by artists of regional and national distinction.  The Gallery specialises in contemporary painting, sculpture, printmaking and photography exhibitions, as well as historic and thematic loan exhibitions from national collections. Acquisitions to The Permanent Collection, comprising over 350 works, reflect the exhibition programme’s strong regional, national and international links.  Exhibitions are supported by scholarly publications, interpretative literature and an education programme for adults and children, including public lectures, art classes and study days. The Gallery also provides training and work experience for students, as well annual placements for graduate and post-graduate students from Northumbria and Newcastle Universities. In 2003/4, with grant support from the Baring Foundation, Northern Rock and the Monument Trust, the Gallery underwent a major redevelopment programme to improve access, double the exhibition space and provide a highly visible public entrance facing the City. Nico Widerberg’s sculpture ‘Pillar Man’ commissioned by ACE and the City as part of the ‘Hidden Rivers’ programme, marks the entrance to the University Gallery and is one of three other major sculptures, commissioned by the university as part of its ‘Percent for Art’ policy. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/universitygallery/

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