Carbon Black 2024
Found images and texts are plucked from one type of circulation (in the news, in digital archives of the library or museum), and re-contextualised to think about coal mining as a past darkness, and to consider its extraction as a plundering of The Earth.
Photography: Tim Gresham
Some of the images and texts that make up this work were developed from the following sources:
Images:
Scott Morrison’s coal: Katharine Murphy Scott Morrison brings coal to question time: what fresh idiocy is this? Thurs 9 Feb 2017 The Guardian.
Briquette, A piece of coal, and Pieces of coal: Collection of Museum Victoria.
Brown Coal Mine, Yallourn Power Station 1 and 2: Collection of the State Library of Victoria.
Text:
That coal dust and Bewildered travellers: Samuel Perks “He Can’t Throw Any of His Coal Dust in My Eyes”, Adventurers and Entrepreneurs in Victory’s Coal Empire. In Schneider-Rebozo, L., McCarthy, J.M., & Peters, J.G. (Eds.). 2018. Conrad and Nature: Essays (1st ed.). Routledge. pp 252 to 268.
Black sun: Julia Kristeva. 1989. Black Sun Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. p 147.
Found images and texts are plucked from one type of circulation (in the news, in digital archives of the library or museum), and re-contextualised to think about coal mining as a past darkness, and to consider its extraction as a plundering of The Earth.
Photography: Tim Gresham
Some of the images and texts that make up this work were developed from the following sources:
Images:
Scott Morrison’s coal: Katharine Murphy Scott Morrison brings coal to question time: what fresh idiocy is this? Thurs 9 Feb 2017 The Guardian.
Briquette, A piece of coal, and Pieces of coal: Collection of Museum Victoria.
Brown Coal Mine, Yallourn Power Station 1 and 2: Collection of the State Library of Victoria.
Text:
That coal dust and Bewildered travellers: Samuel Perks “He Can’t Throw Any of His Coal Dust in My Eyes”, Adventurers and Entrepreneurs in Victory’s Coal Empire. In Schneider-Rebozo, L., McCarthy, J.M., & Peters, J.G. (Eds.). 2018. Conrad and Nature: Essays (1st ed.). Routledge. pp 252 to 268.
Black sun: Julia Kristeva. 1989. Black Sun Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. p 147.
A Blizzard 2021
Inspired by lockdown studio experiments, I made relief prints from found curtain fabrics, and discovered that printing transformed something mundane into an abstract pattern. Five works with images and letterpress-printed text have been folded to both imitate the large pages of a broadsheet newspaper that are often folded to be read and to fit my small press. Letterpress printed texts draw from Walter Benjamin’s descriptions of the public advertising, billboards, and typography that newly surrounded him in the late 1920s, as a blizzard of signs (in One-Way Street, 1928). A fifteen-fragment letterpress-printed phrase from Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s 2009 novel Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead is also included in further reference the power of newspapers to form opinion. These fragments of text and image create my own early 2020s blizzard of signs for viewers to navigate.
Inspired by lockdown studio experiments, I made relief prints from found curtain fabrics, and discovered that printing transformed something mundane into an abstract pattern. Five works with images and letterpress-printed text have been folded to both imitate the large pages of a broadsheet newspaper that are often folded to be read and to fit my small press. Letterpress printed texts draw from Walter Benjamin’s descriptions of the public advertising, billboards, and typography that newly surrounded him in the late 1920s, as a blizzard of signs (in One-Way Street, 1928). A fifteen-fragment letterpress-printed phrase from Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s 2009 novel Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead is also included in further reference the power of newspapers to form opinion. These fragments of text and image create my own early 2020s blizzard of signs for viewers to navigate.