Faye Claridge continues to blog about her artist's residency for Shifting Worlds at Ironbridge Gorge Museum with Meadow Arts
"I’m hoping
to do something spectacular with The Ironbridge and as part of planning this I’ve
been thinking about the bridge as a symbol of the Industrial Revolution.
Bridges are a great symbol of unity, literally linking communities and enabling
travel, but do they symbolise revolution?
The phrase
‘burning bridges’ is dramatic, riotous even, which might remind historians of
the food riots that affected developing industry in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. But this isn’t representative of the vale, where the
Quaker Iron Masters saw very small-scale protests, possibly because of the
worker allotments and welfare donations already in place along with the belief
in fairness regularly demonstrated by the foundry owners.
Rather this
bridge – and the company’s other achievements – were born out of stability,
family, permanence. Perhaps the problem is the word revolution, which the
Oxford dictionary defines as a “forcible overthrow”. Its origins are only
slightly more helpful, developing from an old term to turn which at a push we might dramatize as a cranking up.
The aims of
the Darby foundry owners appear broadly to have been to innovate and improve,
certainly not to revolt. As their biographer Rachel Labouchereputs in, they
wanted “innovations… that would improve conditions for mankind” [i].
They left a huge legacy, which could be symbolised so many ways. Beyond their
technological advancements, reading the Darby family diaries reveals so many
visitors who go on and further influence many others – like Cadbury, Lloyds,
Nash, Darwin, Fry, Cash – and I even wonder whether Prince Charles’ vision of
Poundbury (where workers, business and services co-exist) was affected by his
many visits and role as Patron of the gorge museums.
These
connections – and so many more – make the bridge even more poignant as a
symbol. It’s interesting as a work of engineering, it’s important as the
world’s first iron bridge, it’s vital as a focus for cash-bringing tourism,
it’s heartening as a symbol of continuing industry in the vale. But it’s
strongest for me now as a symbol of the Darbys and the way their business,
family and faith linked and the way their innovations made iron affordable
enough to catapult industrial design all over the world.
They were a
bridge between the rural and the industrial, the past and the future. And like
all bridges (that aren’t burnt in revolution) they link so we can travel in both
directions."
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.
[1] P.37 Deborah Darby by Rachel
Labouchere, William Sessions Ltd, 1993
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