Royal College of Art student wins Eye Line 2025 with his beautiful, disturbing work on the village of Nenthead, where historic lead mining has poisoned the environment
Max Cooper-Clark reached third place in the 2023 Eye Line competition, drawing a worrying but beautifully rendered picture of industrial olive farming processes and the effects they have on land and communities.
This year the Royal College of Art MA Architecture student wins Eye Line with his stirring, emotive study of the village of Nenthead in the Pennines, where lead mining over 200 years has had long and lasting effects on the landscape, the local community, and even the physiologies of people living there. Within the old smelting mill, ‘lead levels in the soil reach up to 134,000mg/kg – 2,000 times the Environment Agency’s safety limit’.
These issues dictated almost every decision in the process. Eric, pictured above, now deceased, was a former miner suffering the effects of osteoporosis brought on by decades underground.
The purple mountain pansy Cooper-Clark portrays flourishes on the surrounding lead-rich slag heaps, the anthocyanins in its white petals absorbing toxic lead and turning white petals purple in the process. These petals would go on to create the dyes for threads Cooper-Clark sewed into banners that were taken to the 2024 Durham Miners’ Gala, or pictured next to the slag heaps or in a community centre.
“He’s compellingly using the essence of the material that caused the environmental catastrophe to make the drawings,” judge Mary Duggan observed, with panel chair Jan-Carlos Kucharek adding that “the mode of creation and display has been made inseparable from the story of the project”.
“The artefacts he’s created are beautiful,” said Samantha Hardingham. “Each piece is approached slightly differently, but they clearly all belong together.” The angles of interrogation and holistic nature of approach to the subject – not least direct engagement with the affected communities – made the entry this year’s Eye Line winner.
There were still contentions. “The images are great, but I get the strange sense some have been enhanced,” said Koldo Lus Arana. “If he has doctored them, perhaps this is not a real but a theoretical narrative project?”, Bongani Muchemwa posited.
“Maybe,” mused Hardingham. “But even if that’s the case, the scope and intelligence of the project are such that I can entirely suspend my disbelief.”