From Coal Mine Waste to Landscape Painting

Evolving through a series of journeys to ex-coal mining sites across the British landscape this art research focuses on the industrial treatment of polluted mine water managed by the UK Coal Authority and re-considers the processes performed and waste by-products (ochre sludge) produced as an inadvertent system of making. Individually located mine water treatment sites were found to produce distinctly coloured minerals. By repurposing these minerals as pigment for paint, naming each pigment by its place of origin and opening the sites as public spaces, the pigment colour, and its process of formation can become a vehicle for examining cultural, social and ecological conditions shaping the contemporary landscape. Ochre is a profoundly human material with deep cultural roots. By drawing upon this history I propose that waste ochre emanating from industrialised geological sources can have an alternative reading as significant contemporary cultural material formed by the industrial and economic histories of the UK. My argument considers how the processes and by-products of coal mine ‘remediation’ can point to a critical moment in history manifesting in the current environmental crisis. I refer to the art historical precedent set by John Latham’s Derelict Land Art: Five Sisters Bing 1976, and the context of British Land art set within the wider art historical framework of Earthwork, to ask, can industrial geological waste and its site of formation be re-imagined as a form of representation for both historic and contemporary culture?