Pits and Pansies Part 2 Project 2024 Max Cooper-Clark Royal College of Art | UK Pits and Pansies traverses topographies of lead extraction and resistance in the North East of England. Steeped in the mine-town of Nenthead, it traces contaminated bodies and exhausted mines, hoping to unearth post-extractive sites as more-than-just-a-toxic leftover. They are spaces saturated by resilience, weirdness and intimacy, queer ecologies defying boundaries across kinships, normative acts of care and refusing notions of refuse.Pits and Pansies is also a parade of hand drawn, woven, dyed and printed banners that carry together, and were made alongside, miners, gays, pansies, suffragettes and particles of metal. This parade shifts in polyphony, recited through the speech and skeletons of local residents, activists and co-conspirators. They include Vera Hutchinson, the head of the local community centre, Eric Lea, a retired lead miner, Mary Ford, a municipal ecologist, Mike Jackson, the co-founder of a queer activist group, Mabel Tuke, a suffragette named after a flower and myself, an architecture student who grew up near the mine.Step by step, this chorus presents a future where the procession threads performance with an assembly of instruments, a shifting structure and purple flowers that make life with lead liveable. Max Cooper-Clark Tutor(s)