footwall

This work was created as part of the Terrane project, an artist in residence at the Western Australian Museum of the Goldfields in 2023. The project investigated representations of the nonhuman in the WA Museum Dwyer and Mackay photographic archive; the history of bioextraction in the form of trees cut down in the surrounding landscape for energy and mining; and mineral specimens from a historical teaching collection.

The process in this work was to take a negative from the Dwyer and Mackay collection and transform it into a large digital negative printed on file so that it could be printed using the classic cyanotype formula. The mud was collected from an abandoned slime dump, mixed with water, applied and then fixed onto the print: The slime returns from the dumps outside to the stopes inside.