Art Meets Energy: Durham University and East Durham Artists Unite for Stronger Seams: Beyond Coal

Stronger Seams: Beyond Coal, running from 28 April to 6 June 2026 at EDAN's gallery on Church Street, Seaham, is the result of a collaboration between EDAN and Durham University's Durham Energy Institute (DEI). The story of how it came about is itself a testament to the power of open, curious conversation.

The connection was sparked when DEI Manager Lynn Gibson shared the Institute's Cabinet of Curiosities, a thought-provoking digital publication exploring energy, landscape and society. Jean Spence at EDAN, was prompted to contact DEI leading to a conversation with Professor Sandra Bell, that quickly revealed a natural alignment of purpose. EDAN had been considering an exhibition centred on the region's coal mining heritage and its aftermath. The DEI's work on energy transition provided the intellectual framework to take that idea much further. The rest, as they say, is history.

Inspired by the Durham Miners' Association motto "The past we inherit, the future we build", the artists in this exhibition have immersed themselves in the region's deep mining history and its enduring legacy, social, cultural, environmental and economic. Their research took them beyond nostalgia, however, and into urgent contemporary questions. Visits to the mine waste-water heating plant at Dawdon and a gallery talk by energy specialist Jeroen van Hunan informed their exploration of how renewable technologies are reshaping East Durham's landscapes and communities.

The exhibition does not offer easy answers. The artists interrogate whether wind farms and solar installations truly deliver prosperity to communities that once powered the nation through coal, and whether these new extractive technologies represent a genuine shift in values or simply a different version of the same industrial logic. Connections to global concerns, rare earth mining, battery waste and environmental degradation, sit alongside more local observations about the recovering Durham coastline and its fragile ecology.

Crucially, Stronger Seams also celebrates the social and cultural energy that mining communities generated, and which outlasted the pits themselves. The exhibition gives particular recognition to the role of women, whose collective strength was the backbone of mining life and has continued to sustain community resilience through decades of change.

"Energy," the exhibition suggests, means far more than fuel or electricity. It is the force that animates landscapes, communities and human creativity. Stronger Seams: Beyond Coal asks what kind of future East Durham wants to and insists that the region's communities should be the ones building it.

The EDAN Gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 11:00–15:00.