Room with a view

Shifting Worlds artist in residence Faye Claridge continues her blog

"It’s very exciting that I’ve ‘moved in’ to Dale House, setting up to make work and hold meetings in the parlour that was first used for a Quaker meeting in 1717.

Faye (right) working at Dale House, Coalbrookdale

That year was significant, I’ve learnt from the Darby Houses volunteers, both because the property was completed and because its owner, Abraham Darby I, died. The only night he spent in the house was in his coffin. But of course his life’s work and the property continued, even his name continued with his son Abraham Darby II and, later, his grandson Abraham Darby III (who built the world famous Ironbridge).

Yet amid all this continuation, including my contact with their descendant Michael Darby and the Quakers who still meet at Dale House, as I look out the large Georgian windows I’m struck with the amount of change seen by this steep-sided valley. From rural gorge dominated by woodland and river it became a noise and smoke-filled gulley, the aptly named blast furnace operating all day and all night – with people previously brought up for farm labouring now working night shifts for all but the driest weeks of the year.

Coalbrookdale by Night, 1801, by Philip James de Loutherbourg, Science Museum Collection

Now in the silence of the museum it’s almost impossible to imagine the impact the furnace had on the community and landscape here. I sit on a window bench and read about the prosperity this bought – wealth, education, housing, opportunity – and fight the notion industry was a destructive monster. Thomas Hardy and other Romantics may not have seen how industry shaped and created as it changed places and people but later critics like William Morris sought to find a compromise, arguing for machines to free people from repressive labour but not to dehumanise, or to take over satisfying labour. Perhaps he was looking to reconcile rather than celebrate the irreversible.

Perhaps, too, this is one of the jobs of the current museums here. They tell a multi-layered story, weaving evidence with context and personality but with little critique. Rather like the glut of Channel 4 exposés into travellers, prisoners, the unemployed etc, an edited description is presented with no transparent opinion. The one opinion that cannot be hidden, however, by their very presence is: This matters. Visitors to Dale House are shocked to hear that the home was nearly demolished in the 1950s, after housing iron works owners and managers for almost 200 years and overlooking the works for even longer. Their shock tells a fascinating tale about where this place and the industrial story sits in our current psyche."

Dale House is one of the Darby Houses, once owned by the Darby Family

Faye Claridge: Industry and the Artist residency, Ironbridge Gorge Museums, June-December 2015

Twitter @fayeclaridge or email info@fayeclaridge.co.uk and on Pinterest

Shifting Worlds: contemporary art and the Birthplace of Industry is a contemporary art programme produced in a partnership between Meadow Arts and the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, funded by Arts Council England.

All exhibited work and events take place at Coalbrookdale, the site of three of the ten exciting and varied museums that make up the Ironbridge Gorge Museums. The museums give a fascinating insight into the people, processes and landscape of the Industrial Revolution and its impact on the present day.

www.meadowarts.org

www.ironbridge.org.uk