A strike baby on a mission

RACHEL Horne appears to be unassuming. In fact, she has the lightness of touch that goes with extremely serious work.

Horne was born in 1984, the year of the great miners' strike, in the mining village of Conisbrough, near Doncaster. Her ancestors had worked down the local mines for generations.

"We found a newspaper article from 1883 with a photo of my great great grandfather saying: '50 years in the mine.' I think it was his 60th birthday. So, I'm pure mining stock all the way."

Then, in 1986, Cadeby Main Colliery was closed and her father lost his job.

Horne says: "They put a notice up. 'Anyone wishing to take redundancy may do so at any age.' He was a skilled coal cutter. He'd been in mining 30 years."

She recalls how her mother brought up her and her three sisters in the aftermath of the closure.

"Sometimes, we'd have no electricity at weekends and stuff and the gas'd be low. I've got this one memory of my mum making toast on the one ring on the oven that worked ... and not really questioning it. She'd be standing there with this fork and the toast on the end."

Her art - photography, collage, drawings, installations and videos, which she characterises collectively as assemblage - is biographical rather than just autobiographical. There's beauty in bringing together experiences, events, memories and people.

For Horne, finding the roll of honour from the 1980s of the 410 men, boys and women who had died in Cadeby since the colliery opened in the late 19th century was a turning point.

"I understood what it meant to be part of the mining community. It was the idea of living with that kind of sacrifice every day," she recalls.

It sparked an interest in the history and present of her local community which was to shape Horne's approach to art.

Roll of Honour, paper nailed on board, marked the beginning of Out of Darkness, Light, an event conceived and curated by Horne last summer.

Out of Darkness, Light is an NUM motto dating from nationalisation in 1946. Sixty years later, Horne's art and organisational skills represent an important part of the effort to resist attempts by Thatcher's heirs to completely erase the mining community, to let the grass grow over it and deprive it of any light whatsoever.

Together with colleagues, she installed 410 lights on Cadeby's grassed-over former slagheap in a memorial and celebration of mining life. It was viewed on the night of May 22 from the Wyre Lady passenger boat on the river Don.

"The slagheap shaped the community," explains Horne. "It's not just a mound. It's a view point for the whole community."

Twenty lights on each side of the miners' footbridge between Conisbrough and Cadeby commemorated the 20 years since the colliery's closure.

An exhibition on the boat of sculpture, abstract and not-so-abstract paintings, textile work, photography, sound sculpture and poetry by other strike babies and new generation artists was loosely based on mining.

"When I was doing the project, it felt like creating magic. Everything came together. It was a really beautiful thing," says Horne.

Her video Life and Land contains a shocking, quick succession of images of Cadeby falling to the bulldozers, as well as footage from a 1930s documentary Black Diamonds, which was shot deep inside the pits, with miners' backbones scraping the tunnel roofs.

Horne is now campaigning to register every ex-colliery as a site of historic interest on Ordnance Survey maps.

Her show Mine the Notion at the Foundry in Old Street, London, last year revealed the kind of metropolitan prejudices that have led to newspaper stories saying that Doncaster is inhabited by slappers with HIV and that ex-mining villages are now paralysed by apathy.

"People were giving me an attitude. 'Your work's about the miners' strike. Why? That was 20 years ago'," she recalls. "So I said: 'But people's lives are still affected'."

As her interest in her town developed, Horne began to record the personal stories that made up the mining community's rich history.

A page in one of her notebooks is about an old lady in Conisbrough who got burgled "and they even stole the tin foil."

Horne's 95-year-old grandma recounts a memory from WWII, when all the women and children from the mining villages gathered together and watched the bombs raining down on Sheffield.

One of the women got hysterical and started yelling: "We're all going to die!"

Someone else said: "Oh shut up, you silly old bleeder." And so she did.

Horne tries to add a playful edge to much of her work even when it is about the saddest things.

One of her pieces, a montage with a smiling Iraqi girl aged about 10 in the foreground, is taken from a photo that Horne's friend took on a tour of duty in Basra in 2003. In one corner, Horne has added a pink sparkly magic wand.

The montage of her friend in Iraq is called Imagine Peace. It begs the question which is the work of art, the physical object or the experiences and stories of her and her friends assembled to make a kind of sculpture.

Another friend who, like Horne, had been in the cadets since 13, had no magic wand. One day, he accidentally left a bullet in his rifle and killed his sergeant.

Horne herself used to go along to army cadets. "There was one point when I wanted to be in the army as well," she recalls. "The kids that go there, these kids have got nothing.

"They get chucked out of school and they've not got designer clothes, just nothing. They go into the army cadets and they're somebody."

She plans to transfer the Cadeby lights to the national anti-war demonstration on February 24 as a memorial for the 130 British soldiers and 650,000 Iraqis killed since the 2003 invasion.
Horne says: "Art should be political in times like these. I think that's right."

She's wary of the art for business's sake bandwagon and suspects that she'd then have to do things she doesn't want to do.

"I'm not looking to be like Tracy Emin and make loads of money. I'm really not interested in that world."

Instead, she wants to feed her work back into her local area, giving the physical pieces to Doncaster library and museum.

But can Horne carry on doing things for free? Although she had Arts Council funding, she spent 10 months without pay organising the Out of Darkness project on a gap year from her fine arts degree course.

She says that she'd like to carry on her work with Novas Arts, which puts established and outsider artists together, but that, this autumn, she will be working in Pakistan.

It will be interesting to see what Horne will make, literally, of the experiences beyond her community.

• For information about her campaign to get all former pits onto Ordnance Survey maps, contact rachel_horne_1984@hotmail.com