12x16 Darkroom print
@ilfordphoto Multigrade
A beautiful few days leaning into spring earlier this year with the hungry lambs
Softest clothing woolly bright
Julian feeds a weak lamb
12x16 darkroom print
From spring, when the ewes shuffle heavily, breathless with the weight and risk of new life.
Printed @318_art_lab
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#kodakfilm #darkroom #devon #spring
This is the mud, not like you know it. Cracked and dry looking but deadly, metres deep of ultra fine stone ground to flour by blasting and carving and brutalising the hill, mixed with water to form a clay that doesn’t let go.
We are on a mountain once covered in virgin rainforest that has had its top sliced off, open cast mining. This dry orange wound stretches nearly 9km across the land, skirted by timid forest unable to reclaim the dead soil. Once virgin rainforest, this land was inhabited by indigenous tribes or Orang Asli (‘original people’ in Malay) until the 1970s when mining companies moved in, threatening the locals and polluting the unique lake nearby to the extent that its UNESCO heritage status was put under review. Illnesses and deaths reported to be related to this were recounted to us by local elders. They used to drink the water from the Lake and use it for cooking.
As we clamber quietly off the boat into the no-man’s land between the lake and the mine, I notice that I’m wondering how toxic our surroundings could be, with heavy metals lacing the ground and water. We start to ascend the hill through starved forest until we reach the vast orange expanse of scarred earth gaping up into the distance. “When’s the last time you were here?” I ask, “never”. “Why?” “scared”. Their families have been on this land for hundreds of years, but according to them, the mining operations that displaced them against their will have had aggressive ‘security’ patrolling the site ever since. We are all on edge, listening for approaching engines.
I had left the film crew on my own and wandered into this lake of mine soup with 10+ kgs of camera gear hanging precariously from shoulders that had seen far too much already, sinking constantly into the slurry as it tried to steal my boots, or claim me as human compensation for injuries inflicted on the earth here. Focusing the lens in the mirage of heat, the sun pressed me to the earth, its simmering weight calm but unstoppable, kneading my fragile body deeper into the clay each time I stood still to fire the shutter. The mud seemed to know this rhythm too, softening beneath me, ready to take what the sun delivered.
