Catherine Hunter & Ian Nesbitt: The Model

Private view, 3 December 6pm – 9pm

'The Model' is an investigation by two artists into the arcane field of salvage ethnography. The investigation is centered on the relationship between two pieces of footage of the same place.

The Model Village is a figure-of-eight shaped housing estate, designed to utopian ideals by architect Percy B. Houfton, and built in 1895  for the families of workers at Cresswell Colliery in the northernmost corner of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. The first piece of footage was shot at the colliery by a miner weeks before the closure of the pit in 1991, the second in 2000 by artist-to-be Catherine Hunter and her uncle Paul, who lived in the Model at the time.

Ten years on, in 2010, and the histories of the two films have become curiously intertwined, thanks to a chance meeting in Cresswell station cafe. Their disparate intentions are long obselete, separated by a decade of steady decline on the estate, and neither is descriptive of the place as it is now. Nonetheless, the two films resonate with an elusive truth and clearly belong together somehow. 'The Model' will investigate their shared history.