mine
2025
At the Old Sulphur Mine Pit in Tipperary, Ireland, now defunct, a tree falls into the hole and continues to grow. I am all tattered from the fenceholes and the decline, standing there watching it hover. The mine, alongside sulphur, might have produced pyrite (fool’s gold) through its workings. Lead and copper and silver too, though it’s hard to say with what we know now. Either way, it is not uncommon for us to look toward a void.
My interest in mines stemmed from my interest in caves. The cave is known as the natural chamber of safety and of chaos, of false gods and mythic shades, and maybe this is what men had in mind when they decided to make their own holes. Or moreso when they began forcefully excavating in order to extract. Silver is a photosensitive mineral often produced as a byproduct from other types of mineral mining, meaning it is particularly astute to being convulsed by little particles of light and rendered into a range of black and grey or what we call tone in our field. I know men who wish only to capture a moment of light in silver and to covet it as such. But when I go to Ireland in search of silver mines I am nearly constantly turned away by abandoned boundaries, by flux-states of lost histories. I don’t find God but rather steep holes that are cordoned off by some other entity. I am grateful for fences which have been graced by the momentary destruction of somebody who came before me, someone who would let nothing stop them from seeing down the shaft or from touching the alkaline flame of the burgeoning neon quarry that rose higher and higher the further we clawed into the earth. The fences holding me back from the holes were broken with earth rocks that were extracted from the shafts themselves. It’s strange, careless - the way some holes are left stripped and wondering if they’ll be filled again.
This is a sulphur mine. Nothing to do with silver at all unless accidental. And things like horses and trees happen near it. I take the mine with me anyway and print it into tiny silver gelatin prints and then I made them big here so you can see. Here are the photographs that are mine but they are not mine.
2025
At the Old Sulphur Mine Pit in Tipperary, Ireland, now defunct, a tree falls into the hole and continues to grow. I am all tattered from the fenceholes and the decline, standing there watching it hover. The mine, alongside sulphur, might have produced pyrite (fool’s gold) through its workings. Lead and copper and silver too, though it’s hard to say with what we know now. Either way, it is not uncommon for us to look toward a void.
My interest in mines stemmed from my interest in caves. The cave is known as the natural chamber of safety and of chaos, of false gods and mythic shades, and maybe this is what men had in mind when they decided to make their own holes. Or moreso when they began forcefully excavating in order to extract. Silver is a photosensitive mineral often produced as a byproduct from other types of mineral mining, meaning it is particularly astute to being convulsed by little particles of light and rendered into a range of black and grey or what we call tone in our field. I know men who wish only to capture a moment of light in silver and to covet it as such. But when I go to Ireland in search of silver mines I am nearly constantly turned away by abandoned boundaries, by flux-states of lost histories. I don’t find God but rather steep holes that are cordoned off by some other entity. I am grateful for fences which have been graced by the momentary destruction of somebody who came before me, someone who would let nothing stop them from seeing down the shaft or from touching the alkaline flame of the burgeoning neon quarry that rose higher and higher the further we clawed into the earth. The fences holding me back from the holes were broken with earth rocks that were extracted from the shafts themselves. It’s strange, careless - the way some holes are left stripped and wondering if they’ll be filled again.
This is a sulphur mine. Nothing to do with silver at all unless accidental. And things like horses and trees happen near it. I take the mine with me anyway and print it into tiny silver gelatin prints and then I made them big here so you can see. Here are the photographs that are mine but they are not mine.