Norman Cornish. Courtesy Northumbria University

Industry in two periods of the 20th century are the focus of the current exhibition Nightshift at Northumbria University’s Baring Gallery (until November 3 2006).

Paintings of miners in the 1930s-60s by pitman artist Norman Cornish are complemented by Ian Macdonald’s photography of manufacturing in the North East from the last 30 years.

Norman Cornish. Courtesy Northumbria University

Norman Cornish, born 1919 in Spennymoor, County Durham, became a miner at the age of 14 – an occupation he remained in for 33 years. His preoccupation, however, was drawing and painting, which he took up after enrolling at the Spennymoor Settlement Sketching Club at 16-years-old.

The art he produced over the following decades serves as a chronicle of an era, a portrait of the mining industry in the North East in the mid-20th century. His ‘narrow world’, as Spennymoor novelist Sid Chaplin described it, was one below ground at the Dean and Chapter Colliery, while above ground he recorded off shift miners, “squatting on their hunkers soaking in the sunshine and the good crack.”

Norman Cornish. Courtesy Northumbria University

Like Chaplin, Cornish flourished in the stimulating environment of the Spennymoor Settlement, an educational project that enabled the poor to broaden their cultural horizons. His prolific output made him into a distinguished painter, recognised as an important English artist.

His paintings depict flat-capped miners heading home after a days drudging, a quiet pint in the pub, and aproned women chatting. One painting, of a lone miner wandering down a fenced lane towards the town with its lit up windows, has echoes of Van Gogh, transplanted to an industrial town in the North of England.

Ian Macdonald, Furnaces. Courtesy Northumbria University

Ian Macdonald brings out the human side of industry, too, in black and white images of the landscape at the mouth of the River Tees, which infer a sense of struggle between man and nature.

His photographs range from workers caught off guard, relaxing, to steel furnaces standing like insolent monuments against the sky.