Materials

I have been thinking about materials differently recently.

My practice has been concerned with extraction, particularly gold mining and the relationships that exist around it. I have been working with materials such as cloth, photographs, rocks, soil, water, and found objects. Most of the time, I think about these things through their physical presence. I ask where they come from, what has happened to them, and what they can communicate within the work.

A recent conversation about my research made me stop and think about this more carefully. There was an interest in the way I treat materials in my work, especially the relationship between tangible and intangible materials.

I had not really separated these things before.

When I say material, I usually think about something I can touch. A piece of cloth. A rock. A photograph. Soil. Water. Something that can be moved from one place to another and transformed into something else.

But there are other things that are present in these materials that cannot be touched.

A rock from a mining site is not only a rock. It comes from a particular landscape. Someone had to extract it. It has an economic value. It may be connected to a particular community or history. It can remind someone of a place that has changed.

The same thing happens with cloth.

The cloth has a physical form, but it can also carry memories of labour, domestic life, movement, or use. A photograph has its physical surface, but what it contains can extend beyond the image itself.

This has made me start asking whether memory, labour, history, and knowledge can also be thought of as materials.

I find this question important because of my interest in extraction.

When something is extracted from the earth, it is easy to identify the physical material that has been removed. Gold is extracted. Rock is moved. Soil is displaced. Water becomes contaminated.

But extraction also produces things that are harder to identify.

Labour is involved.

Knowledge is involved.

Memory is produced.

Landscapes change.

Relationships between people and places change.

Some things disappear while others remain.

These are not materials in the conventional sense, but they have effects. They shape what remains after extraction.

This is where my own way of working becomes important.

I am interested in taking materials that already have histories and putting them into new relationships. When I transfer an image onto cloth, for example, I am not simply using cloth as a surface. The cloth becomes part of how the image is understood. The physical material and the image begin to affect each other.

The same applies when I work with objects connected to mining.

I am interested in what the object is, but also in what it carries.

I am still trying to understand what this means for my practice.

I do not want to make a simple distinction between tangible and intangible materials. The more I think about it, the harder that distinction becomes.

A memory can influence how we treat an object.

Labour can leave traces on a material.

History can determine the value given to an object.

A physical material can preserve something that is no longer physically present.

So perhaps the question is not whether something is tangible or intangible.

Perhaps the question is how these different forms of materiality meet.

This is where my research is now.

I want to look more closely at the materials that come from extraction, but also at the things that accompany them. I want to understand what remains in a material after it has been removed from its original context.

I am interested in the physical things I can collect and manipulate, but also in the memories, histories, labour, knowledge, and relationships that cannot be collected in the same way.

I do not have a fixed answer yet.

For now, I am asking:

What else can be a material?