SPATIAL TALES OF UNEARTHLY CRITTERS: A Subterranean (Un)Miner
Each piece symbolizes the process of shaping a creature’s habitat through direct engagement with earth. This hands-on experience not only deepened my connection to the materials but also fostered an “addictive” desire to dig, allowing me to embody the creature I was creating.
Presented at Kunstistituut Melly
(January 2024)
In the desolation reverberating from ceaseless mining operations, a being emerges from the wreckage of a plundered underground environment. Having toiled as a miner for the majority of its life, this creature has experienced a violent physical and spiritual metamorphosis. Its body and mind have been caged in a cavern of dirt, dust and darkness, deprived of its basic need for air, sunlight and rest. The conditions that gave rise to this being are entrenched in exploitation, where the unrelenting pursuit of resources has left enduring scars on both the land and the body of the creature. It is a consequence of unchecked industrial operations, a casualty of an economic system that prioritises profit over human life and the earth’s natural environment.
The former coal miner now embodies a mosaic of machinery and drilling devices, his flesh replaced with toxic metals and his limbs replaced with mechanical parts and pieces. Upon realising he has been stripped of his humanity, he experiences a moment of agonising lament. He is plagued by shame and guilt, and resists returning to the surface, dreading that sunlight will expose his horrifying form. His body is the outcome of a life subjugated to the merciless demands of industrial progress and violent extraction. Driven by an intense desire to escape sunlight, he establishes an underground sanctuary where he can come to terms with the fragments of his lost existence. Sheltered below, he discovers he isn't entirely dehumanised. Dreaming once more of the landscape of the mine as it existed before its devastation, he systematically breaks through the subterranean labyrinth, gradually introducing light into its deepest underground recesses, hoping the Earth will forgive him by yielding some fruit.
Embracing his distance from humanity, the creature does not wish to return to a world which will subject him once again to a relentless cycle of exploitation. Instead, his attention is turned to the earth as he uses his accumulated knowledge of this underground environment to practise a regeneration of the land. As seasons unfold—warm summers and rainy, frozen winters—the process of his healing and the land’s restoration prevails, and he grows closer to the earth which he once devoured. Through an excavation of the mine’s interior, bringing light incrementally closer, the wind disperses seeds and soil as the creature attempts to build a new reality within the remnants of the old.
His shelter evolves into a seed vault, progressively enclosing him—an underground space characterised by contradictions and tensions, blending the familiar and the otherworldly. This is a space of reclamation, as the creature endeavours to construct a new reality within the remnants of the old. Rain contributes to streams and lakes, and the first seeds sprout underground. Within this underground haven, the space functions as a protective cloak for the former subterranean miner as he comes to accept his new embodied state.
References
Image 1. De Beer mine workers are X-rayed at the end of every shift
before leaving the diamond mines, Kimberley, South Africa,
October 1954.
Image 2,3. Diamond mining, South Africa, 1872. In 1866 a diamond was
found near Hopetown, Northern Cape Province, and in 1869 a larger
diamond, known as the Star of Africa, was found and initiated the
South African Diamond Rush.
Image 4. A newspaper article about Dr. Dyar’s tunnels
first discovered in 1917. The entomologist of The Smithsonian came forward,
Mr. Harrison G. Dyar Jr., who admitted that he had built the tunnel fifteen
years earlier and that it was a ‘’hobby of his’’. It had started in 1905, he
explained, when he was digging the flowerbeds for his wife and thought,
“I could just keep going”...