Fishes, wishes, boats and hopes

It started with a fish. And a wish. Then a boat of hope. And, gradually, a stretch of the Durham Heritage Coast turned into an unlikely art gallery – conceived and curated by anyone who was inspired to contribute to a growing collection of transient creations using the flotsam and jetsam on the shores of the North Sea.

Now, a couple of months after the initial Fishes and Wishes project, dreamed up by the artists at The Barn at Easington, a whimsical project has become one of the surprise hits of the COVID lockdown. And it’s spearheading a return of creative workshops in the East Durham area, with Nicola Balfour and the team from the Barn helping to create a galaxy of suns in a park in nearby Peterlee last weekend.

The project is a great example of how the crisis of lockdown can be an engine for change: a new attitude to the environment, to the local landscape. But it also highlights how we can still tap into older ideas about community and a sense of place, establishing a corner of the world that is ‘ours’ to share.

A DIY art gallery

“Fishes & Wishes came out of realising that suddenly we couldn’t have people coming to the Barn anymore,” Nicola explained. “We had to think about how we could keep bringing what we do to other people. So we dreamt up this idea of a story that people could watch online and respond to. We hoped that they might make their own transient artworks wherever they could get to, whether that was on the beach, like us, or in the woods, at home, in the garden. We wanted to be very accessible to everyone, and to encourage everyone to come outside and be in those spaces.”

When the first video went online, a fairytale of a talking fish reminding humans how to wish for better things, nobody quite knew what to expect. John Quinn’s storytelling captured the imagination, though, and before long, the sands at Hawthorn Hive, a remote stretch of the heritage coast, were decorated with a collection of artworks. Simple or sophisticated, this school of fish, crabs, whales and more slowly expanded. Passing walkers, struck by the sight, shared photos on social media and the legend grew. Two further stories followed, inspiring people to create stars and boats. Among the highlights was a superbly detailed portrait of World Cup-winning footballer Jackie Charlton, which appeared in tribute to a celebrated son of the Northeast coalfields days after his death on July 10, but every contribution – down to the simplest of schoolgirl efforts – plays its part in transforming the beach.

“It’s been fantastic,” Nicola added. “One of our ambitions was that people might come and make their own artworks but we didn’t know what to expect. It’s been fantastic to see it happen. Suddenly Hawthorn Hive has become a bit of a destination beach. Families are coming along, having a look at what’s here and adding something of their own. We’ve been back several times and met people doing something, talking about the project.

“It’s really interesting that a beach that was never used very much has become a place where people come – and suddenly it’s much cleaner than before, people are picking up the rubbish and taking it away with them. It’s almost like an art gallery, but instead of just coming to look at something, everyone is invited to make something too.

“That’s so much more powerful. In a traditional kind of gallery space you go to look and maybe there’s a little activity to do on the side. Here, you actually take part. I think that’s been the key to the success of the project, and people have been inspired by each other. That’s a great outcome for us.”

Tapping a creative seam

While an ocean of aquatic sculpture forms the latest attraction on the Durham Heritage Coast, the Barn at Easington isn’t a new feature in the East Durham cultural landscape. It’s operated for six years as a way to encourage creativity in one of the most deprived regions of England. The emphasis is on nature-based learning, building connections with the local community and the environment. Regular visits from schools are testament to the positive impact even a relatively small-scale cultural initiative can have on people’s lives, while family events and music festivals expand the project’s reach still further.

The team includes Nicola herself, with 20 years’ experience in outdoor education, and Ellie Hare, part of the Amber Films collective that has recorded the life of this region since the turbulent days of the 1984 miners’ strike. And, despite the metropolitan suspicion that Britain’s former industrial heartlands are a cultural desert, the Barn has nurtured a creative streak that has its roots deep in the coal seams of old, an echo of the oft-hidden creativity that inspired a generation of pitman painters or craftsmen fashioning everything from furniture to fiddles, pigeon lofts to allotment gardens.

“The people of East Durham are incredibly skilful, creative and talented,” Nicola insists. “Maybe there’s a link to the days of mining. At that time, people were out and about in their landscape and there’s still a high level of love for the landscape. A project like Fishes and Wishes makes sense because it’s about making stuff – something that draws on old local traditions – rather than more traditional ways of accessing art via galleries. Besides, there aren’t any galleries here unless you go to Durham itself.

“Maybe we’re creating places where people can be creative themselves, and share that in a special, unique landscape. And we’ve had some great conversations during the project. One ex-miner sticks in my mind. He came over and joked that we were the secret artists and started talking about how much he liked the work, comparing with how the beaches used to be black with coal dust.

“Those mining communities had a huge pride in their locality and even today, long after the pits closed, that still exists to some extent.”

Local initiative, global resonance

The success of Hawthorn Hive, supported by East Durham Creates and the local council’s Area Action Partnership, travelled outside the local community. Local media attention attracted interest across the Northeast of England, and social media made connections with others at the opposite end of the country – or even the other side of the world.

“We’ve gone completely beyond our normal audience,” Nicola added. “This has put us in touch with different people, and that’s been great. It encourages a crossover about what we can do in our own landscapes, what things work in different places. And it’s amazing how far the idea has spread – we had people commenting from Wales, from the Southwest of England and the furthest away was in Thailand – a rather different beach from ours. Who knows where next?”

And feedback from the wider communities has informed the evolution of the project. Many of the ‘wishes’ that accompanied the first wave of fishes reflected on the amount of litter found up and down the coastline. Consciously or otherwise, that found its way into the second phase, a giant sun on Horden beach, with beer cans making a shiny heart to the display.

“There was a lot of concern about litter and we thought it would be great to lightly introduce the idea of collectivism, to encourage everyone to do something to make a change,” Nicola said. “It’s quite useful, putting out little messages through the stories. It’s nothing overt, we don’t want a stern ‘pick up your rubbish’, but we want people to feel they can do something to help.

“But the beer cans in the sun were more of an aesthetic decision. I just wanted something shiny in there and we had a bit of a debate about whether it was a good idea. In the end I got my way, and we cleared a lot of rubbish off the beach while we were making it –but they stopped me from making the whole sun out of beer cans!”

Creativity out of boredom

As the drumbeat of ‘back to normal’ beats ever louder, there’s a danger that this strange summer of changed priorities might soon be lost in the day-to-day rush of work-school-home-pub and all the attendant distractions of our helter-skelter 21st century lives. For Nicola, though, the change of pace is something to cherish and, hopefully, preserve.

“I believe that we are all really creative, that everyone has access to that inside themselves,” she said. “In lockdown, people had to turn inwards a lot and think about what they do, and why. After watching TV for so many hours, people get bored, and I’m real advocate that out of boredom comes creativity.

“Maybe there’s a connection: when we couldn’t get lost in the immediate, we were pushed to a place where we had to be the authors of our own creativity, where we had to start finding pleasure and absorption in self-directed activity, self-initiated learning. I’d love to see people accessing that in themselves.

“Let’s keep being bored as a good thing, or a catalyst for good things. Let’s not be too quick to offer distractions but be a bit self-deterministic and dig deeper in ourselves, think about what we want to do. Lockdown has been hard but I think it has made people more creative because we can’t get lost in the quotidian of our lives.

“Doing less can be good. We’re placing a different value on time, maybe we’re reassessing ‘empty’ time as ‘possibility’ time rather than having to get through everything stacked up through every day.”

There’s a temptation to dismiss this as ivory tower thinking, the classic ‘out-of-touch’ artist. But Nicola and the rest of the team at the Barn are still coping with the realities of sustaining a business in difficult circumstances. She estimates the lockdown might have cost between half and three-quarters of the usual income, with the time from the Easter holidays through the end of the summer typically being their busiest period. Grants and support for the self-employed have eased some of that, but it’s taken all the resourcefulness acquired over 20 years as a self-employed artist and educator to keep going.

And the key lesson is one about value – time over possessions. “If you want more freedom, have less stuff.

“We’re not encumbered by debt, my philosophy has always been to live very cheaply, so we’re not pressurised by a need to earn huge sums of money. I appreciate not everyone is in that position, but I would urge everyone to try to move towards that position. Owe less, own less. Drive a cheaper car. Value time – a limited resource – rather than things.”

This article is part of the Talking Northeast project, now running on Substack. Please take the time to explore the blog and consider subscribing if you like our work. If a subscription is not right for you at present, please consider making a one-off donation via Talking Northeast’s ‘Buy Me a Coffee’ page.

I first made contact with the Barn thanks to Northumberland-based photographer Sharon Bailey, who was the subject of an earlier interview in this series.