I am giving a lecture ‘Coal Tides’ about my paintings made from Thames coal at the Sentient Performativities Symposium, organised by art.earth at Dartington June 26th -29th. There will be a small accompanying exhibition of my work at Dartington, during the course of the Symposium.
Making my own pigments from found materials extends my interaction to the environment around me. I walk through particular places such as the Thames shore, London streets, Devon beaches and give attention to what I find there, connecting with the geological, biological and human stories embodied in the landscape. I have recently made a series of paintings and prints with coal picked up from the Thames shore. It was shipped from Newcastle to fuel the homes and industries of London from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, blackening the buildings and the lungs of its inhabitants. Slipping and dropped into the river while being unloaded from ship to dock, the coal has been washed up and down with the tides, smoothed into pebbles and sorted by the River into lines on the strand.
Smashing and grinding the coal into pigment is slow and full of the friction of a direct encounter with hard rock, it reminds me of the hard labour of the people who dug, carried, burnt and breathed this coal. The slowness of the process gives me time to think about deep time through which this coal was made from the remnants of Carboniferous forests and then came to meet me on the Thames Shore.
