Max Cooper-Clark

Architecture (MA)

Portraits depicting the solidarities and kinships between queers, miners, women and activists that resisted extraction and state subjection during Nenthead's operation. They are bordered by a collage of archival images that depict these entwined narratives of refusal. The hand-drawn banner sits on the wall of the Nenthead Community Centre, where soup was served to striking families during the 1984/85 Miners' Strike.

The banner depicts Eric Lea, a retired Lead Miner, who worked the underground tunnels between 1967 and 1984, in his kitchen where water is inundated with particles of Lead. Eric passed away in June 2024, four months after sitting for this portrait, due to complications with osteoporosis. The banner is held within Nenthead’s Music Hall and behind Eric's former mining team, who sit with a portrait to remember their colleague and dear friend.

The banner depicts a hand-drawn plan of the remaining mine workings, Nenthead village and underlying metal veins (1:2000) and a section of the central stream and rocky piles (1:20), with the border showing the lead levels and pH in the gully across each week of the year in 2023. The banner is supported by two of Nenthead's residents, John and Michael, in the shadow of the lead smelting waste piles that continue to encircle the town.

A section of a 5m tall structure that harbours music practices and banner making, as well as a series of apparatus, such as sinks, changing rooms, fermentation chambers and water storage tanks. The banner rests on the perimeter of Durham Racecourse, a wetland where all the mining communities gather after the Gala to share stories and music.

About

Max Cooper-Clark (b.1999, United Kingdom) is a spatial practitioner and researcher from the North East of England. His work explores the intersection of art, architecture, ecology, and extractivism.

Prior to studying Architecture at the RCA, he worked at David Chipperfield Architects and attended the University of Cambridge, where he was awarded prizes for the best performance in an Arts subject and served as a Visiting Lecturer. His work has featured in publications and exhibitions at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, Royal Academy of Art, Royal Society of Artists, Hangar CIA Lisbon, Betts Project and has been given awards by Royal Institute of British Architect and the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland.

Max is currently working with Cooking Sections, a London based practice who use food as a lens and tool to observe landscapes in transformation. His graduation project, Pits and Pansies, was awarded the Dean’s Prize and nominated for the 2024 RIBA Silver Medal.

Pits and Pansies, traverses topographies of lead extraction and resistance in the North East of England. Steeped in the mine-town of Nenthead, it traces contaminated bodies and exhausted mines, hoping to unearth post-extractive sites as more-than-just-a-toxic leftover. They are spaces saturated by resilience, weirdness and intimacy, queer ecologies defying boundaries across kinships, normative acts of care and refusing notions of refuse.

Pits and Pansies is a parade of banners that carry together miners, gays, pansies, suffragettes and particles of metal. This parade shifts in polyphony, recited through the speech and skeletons of local residents, activists and co-conspirators. They include Vera Hutchinson, the head of the local community centre, Eric Lea, a retired lead miner, Mary Ford, a municipal ecologist, Mike Jackson, the co-founder of a queer activist group, Mabel Tuke, a suffragette named after a flower and Max, an architecture student who grew up near the mine.

Step by step, this chorus presents a future where the procession threads performance with an assembly of instruments, a shifting structure and purple flowers that make life with lead liveable.

Pits and Pansies is both narrated and enacted through a series of banners . Each 2 by 2m fabric is hand drawn in charcoal, stained with dyes made from purple mountain pansies, and screen and acetone printed with archive documents and photographs. They were all completed, in addition to the proposed structure, in collaboration with the community at Nenthead over a series of workshops, walks, interviews, group draws and meals. These banners were eventually paraded in the 2024 Durham Miners’ Gala across the lead-inundated landscapes between Nenthead and Durham. They will return to the parade in 2025 with new drawings overlaid in palimpsest to reflect the fluctuating topographies and bodies touched by lead.

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