Conduit
ongoing
I think it’s possible that god lives in the underground. We form pipelines between the aboveground and belowground worlds: conduit through which we send up raw material and sometimes send back down transmuted objects and waste made from that raw stuff. It’s probable that other things happen along these routes, some of which our language might only be able to put into containers such as mythic or metaphysical. The environmental sites affected by drilling and extraction are considered diseased, a categorization based on the idea of an “untouched landscape” which never really existed in the first place. As indexes still refuse to be separated from their referents (i’m referring to holes here), we must accept the mined + abandoned landscape on its own terms as a new entity or paradigm in the world and extend care to it in its new state. I’m interested in what happens when one approaches all of these slippages both literally and allegorically to consider how we exist in our material world - a world in large part built from resources extracted from the underground.
Conduit is a multi-phase, ongoing photographic investigation of abandoned mineral mining sites across the world. At sites of extraction it becomes clear that the most prevalent force is the tension between the positive physical material that we remove from the earth and the negative void that is left behind. This project engages with this force through documentation of artifacts of human intervention found underground (which are contemporary equivalents of cave paintings), the ecology of these sites aboveground, and explorations into mythic understandings of the void. In order to further discourse on sustainability and environmental conditions aboveground, it is necessary to extend this discourse to the colonized realm of the underground. And in order to talk about the underground, we must first approach the archetype of the void, and the consequences of making a hole. Using medium format film, expired silver gelatin paper, washi, typewriter ink, wood, encaustic, and collage, this work re-engages with material in a world that is often (incorrectly) thought to be already dematerialized.
The work shown in this portfolio was created at sites across Ireland, including at Avoca Mines, Ballinafunshogue Mines, Glengowla Mines, and Allihies Cave. Conduit is currently in its second phase, taking place in Cobalt, Canada with the guidance of SPAO Ottawa.
