At the beginning of the 20th century the coastal stretch between Seaham and Hartlepool was one of the most densely industrialised areas in western Europe and one of the world’s major centres for the deep mining of coal. Konttinen’s The Coal Coast, a series of landscapes exploring the eerie aftermath of the pit closures, comes after three years’ intensive photography of the metamorphosis of County Durham’s ‘black’ beaches, her work a kind of post-industrial fossil hunt.