Almost a week in to it!

September 6th 2022.

Brooke and self have two separate spaces to work and sleep with a shared kitchen. The residence has a print room, in process of being rebuilt after the original one that was destroyed in the landslide of 2020.

Earth moves in a big way. Five days of heavy rainfall dislodged the earth on the mountain sending tons of wet mud down into the town. Miraculously no one was killed but houses and businesses were wiped out. There’s a pile of debris left at the water’s edge as a memorial (It seems that way anyhow). The earth + mud forces bent steel I beams and twisted metal framed structures beyond their upstanding selves, laying them almost flat.

I placed a weatherproof (loads of duct tape) pinhole camera on a bent metal vessel to face the fjord hoping to catch the comings and goings of waterway traffic. The ferry from Denmark comes by weekly bringing buses and massive all-terrain vehicles to shuttle tourists to the glaciers; students of geography & geology to study at the research centre and containers with supplies for the town. There’s a young vibe in this town and a culture of creativity. Seydisfjodur has the reputation as the art capital of the east coast. Artist Dieter Roth had multiple workspaces in Iceland, one of them being Seydisfjordur. His influence is felt here still.

My work space and shared kitchen at the Skaftfell Art residency.

September 1st, The drive to Art residence at Skaftfell in Seyðisfjörður

From Reykjavik the drive was long to the NE town on the fjord where our artist residency offers us a studio. We stayed in a guest house en route by the Vatnajökull, one of the largest glaciers in Iceland. Next day we drove the rest of the way on southern route for 7-8 hrs trying not to stop too often to take photos!!

This month I will be sharing a studio and apartment with Brooke Holve @Holvebrooke. This is a special opportunity offered to us, based on our cell phone project of 2021 and exhibited at the Seager Grey Gallery in Mill Valley, California.

 

Much melting going on and bergs drifting out to sea greatly diminished in size.

Working on paper. May 2022.

I love working with paper, especially the heavyweight (200-350gsm). When I pour water and inks onto the smooth surface of a hot press Saunders Waterford for example, I am fascinated by the way the paper bubbles up and that caused the inks to run in unpredictable ways. Patterns of the path followed by merging coloured inks are revealed when the inks are dry.

Manipulating water, pigments and inks, charcoal and acrylic mediums gives me qualities of rock surfaces and natural forms.

On paper I tend to experiment and mix it up a little more. Using screen printing, inks, gold leaf, graphite, acrylics and sometimes collage to create mixed media pieces or to go minimal and show off the beauty of paper and line. Abstractions from ideas, thoughts while working and research into climate, natural phenomena and geology are my motivators.

My experience of the geology of Iceland (a residency in June of 2018) continues to influence my work. In September 2022 I will return again to Iceland for a residency at Skaftfell, a small town on a NE fjord.

Oak Gall inks on Fabriano buff tone paper 280gsm

Materiality Re_Mined exhibition at Seager Gray Gallery, Mill Valley, California July 1-31 202

Deep within the screen of a smart phone.

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Materiality Re_Mined

Rather than give a statistics view behind our collaborative project, I will aim to talk about the work itself including ways we stretched our own practices to highlight this project particularly. For instance learning how to edit video was a new task for me. Operating a laser etching machine was in Brooke’s task box. 

Although the learning curves are frustrating at times there’s also a great sense of expansion in oneself when pushing to learn something new for a bigger purpose. 

This exhibition at the Seger Gray Gallery is the result of a two-year collaboration between Brooke Holve and myself. The Extraction Art project is part of a multi faceted global movement focusing on extractive industries particularly mining.  The website, informs how this project started and who is behind it and where it’s going etc. 

Because landscape is a primary source of motivation for my artwork I decided that exploring the inner workings of the smart phones and it’s connection to earth geology would be an interesting project. We discovered that 70 minerals and elements from the periodic table are involved in the building of a smart phone. The same minerals are often used in many alternative energy sources. As our demand grows so resources shrink and now there’s a desperate attempt around the world for geologists to hunt for new resources. 

There are conflict minerals, rare earth elements and commodities. 

For example cassiterite is a mineral containing tin. Tin is used in smart phones for soldering different metal components together. Tin is also use with the element indium to make indium-tin-oxide, a very thin transparent and electrically conductive material used to make smart phone touchscreens. The most important source of tin is from the ore mineral cassiterite found in hydrothermal veins and alluvial placer deposits. The current leading produces of tin are China, Indonesia and Myanmar. 

Cassiterite is also a conflict mineral because much of it is mined in areas where child labour is practiced and /or much of the profits are syphoned off for gorilla warfare and militia training camps. This is especially prevalent in the Congo where also cobalt is mined. 

There are many efforts by large companies such as Apple to avoid these sources but often it is very hard to trace the source. My hope is that this research which is here translated into the visual arts might inspire awareness of the damage to the landscape, to peoples lives and ecosystems etc. 

While we are so dependent on this miracle machine, we are consumers and our voice has effect. There is growing concerns around the globe regarding demand and supply; big corporations are investing in recycling minerals from devices but more care and effort is needed in mining practices and more awareness of the resource footprint of our phones offers possible opportunities towards a sustainable industry. 

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