"THE CHECKS"
Competition-winning Installation as part of Historic England’s “Immortalised” Series 2018
Shortlisted for the Museums and Heritage Awards 2019 (temporary Installation)
Our response was to consider the social history of the mining communities of Kent, one of the pioneering centres of coal mining in the UK, yet a story little known outside the county. The final installation was created from 1,200 individual miners “Checks” – the identity tags carried by the miners so they could be identified in the case of accident and “checked” to ensure they had safely returned to the surface. The exhibition piece immediately captured the human scale of the Kent Coalmines, with each check representing an individual’s story.
Every check which carried a unique number represented a miner at one of the Kent Collieries. Through the use of a scanned QR code or guide book, visitors could select any one of the numbered checks to access the story of a specific miner, enabling an engagement with the exhibit from a uniquely human and individual perspective.
