HIDDEN GEMS

2022-

Installation view from the group exhibition *Entanglements* at CVA Denver, Jan-March 2023

Hidden Gems (2022-ongoing) is a photographic collage project that asks us to reflect on the global infrastructures of extraction through colliding images of mined landscapes, minerals, (hidden) labour, and toxic waste disposal. Taking the notion of the ‘planetary mine’ as its starting point, the project makes new connections between the raw materials that are extracted and the industrial waste that is deposited back into the ground; the subsurface is the fractured site of this troublesome circular economy. This series of photographic collages explore this mirrored surface, colliding the deep time associated with mineral extraction, with the future implications of industrial waste burial. The central image in this project, also titled Hidden Gems, is a large-scale work that utilises the potential for photographic collage to collapse time, creating a speculative image. This approach, alongside also using inflation and distortion as a methodology for digital image-making, mirrors the speculative frenzies that alter the costs of raw materials.

Another collage in this project - Balance Transfer - further interrogates this financial practice, whilst drawing attention to the material journeys of profitable minerals used in technology industries. This project attempts to shine a light on the material journeys that are intended to be hidden from the consumer. Technological devices are not just a product of extraction but also an instrument of extraction, where data mining processes mimic the geological mining used in its production. However, the geological processes employed in order to keep up with the demand for these products are concealed.

Finally, Hidden Gems also attempts to close the complex binary between city and country, where sites of extraction supply raw materials that make up the urban terrain. Gray Brechin describes the city as an ‘inverted mine;’ Hidden Gems extends this philosophy to describe not just that which is unearthed, but also that which will eventually return.