Wheal Josiah. Installation with Video.
Etching and inkjet onto tissue paper, mounted on a white board with holes cut to frame illuminated transparent photographs within the etched and inkjet printed images.
This was a site specific installation for the Tamar Valley, a designated area of outstanding natural beauty that also includes great industrial archaeology, including very old mine workings with the spoil heaped by the river banks, to 20th century arsenic mining which left red barren poisoned ground still in place 100 years later.
I acquired some old 19th and 20th-century photographs of miners. I turned the images into positive transparencies so that when backlit they would stare at us directly from their mine, as we stared back at them. In this case, it was miners from Wheal Josiah, mining arsenic. The imagery around these circular illuminated holes was a x- sectional diagram of Wheal Josiah with the galleries running horizontally at different depths with the vertical shafts acting as the transport between the mine galleries and the surface. Also printed onto the acid-free tissue paper were the intaglio images of the fractal making technique which mimicked what I had discovered some years ago.
